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It remains one of the great ironies in the banking market: banks make big investments in digital applications for the consumers who refuse to pay (“free checking!!”) and comparatively little investment in digital apps for the business customers who don’t blink at reasonable fees. I can’t help but wonder how often business users, after a long day at the office, switch over to their bank’s mobile tools for their personal accounts and wonder why the experience is so much better. I mean, where’s the love?
And so I really enjoyed this post from Jim Van Dyke at Futurion Digital. It looks like Jim is going to do a webinar with ACI on the topic of UX improvements in Business Banking — and knowing Jim, I’m sure it will be insightful. Futurion, and digital strategy and design agency Comrade, did an exhaustive UX study of the largest 15 US banks recently that conclusively demonstrated that mobile app UX was an enormous predictor of consumer adoption.
But let’s start with a little quiz….
Of all payment mechanisms available to SMBs — cash, checks, cards, ACH, etc — which one is the most widely accepted?
If you guessed cards or cash or ACH then you’d be….wrong. Checks continue to dominate the payment landscape. As the graphics from a recent study on SMB technology adoption from PYMNTS.com show, any perception that checks are rapidly disappearing is simply not true.
No matter how you look at it, checks will be very much a part of the B2B payment world for the foreseeable future. And yet, banks have been curiously slow to exploit the mobile channel for businesses despite the runaway success of Mobile Deposit on the retail side of the bank. Why?
Since I spend a lot of time talking with bankers and technology providers, here’s what I notice:
So what should banks be doing to pick up their business banking game?
Jim’s post expertly catches the tension and opportunity inherent in the SMB market for banks:
"Small businesses often represent the greatest mismatch between need, opportunity and willingness to pay, which is where banks in particular must ensure their UX is ready for problem-solving."
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Good luck!
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