In Canada, mobile banking is growing up faster than Justin Bieber. So from March 21 to April 9, 2014, Forrester reviewed and scored the mobile banking offerings from the five largest retail banks in Canada across seven categories: Range of touchpoints; Enrollment and login; Account information; Transactional functionality; Service features; Cross-channel guidance; and marketing and sales. You can read the complete report here or by clicking on the link below:

Here is a sampling of some of our findings:

  • CIBC earns the highest overall score with BMO and Scotiabank on its heels. With an overall score of 71 out of 100, CIBC received the highest overall scores among the five retail banks we evaluated, continuing the firm’s leadership in mobile banking since it launched its first iPhone app four years ago. But the other large Canadian banks are hot on CIBC’s trail: BMO and Scotiabank each earned a score of 70 out of 100 with impressive – and recent – overhauls of their mobile offerings. Scotiabank lets users apply for new products via mobile with pre-filled, mobile-optimized applications. BMO, meanwhile, ensures that all mobile money movement task flows are clear and consistent — incorporating the same progress meter at the top of every screen.
  • RBC Royal Bank and TD Canada Trust both made notable enhancements over last year. Our Mobile Banking Functionality Benchmark is a moving target – we intentionally “move the goal posts” as customers’ digital needs and expectations change – so year-over-year scores aren’t perfectly comparable. But it is clear from this year’s benchmark that the digital teams at both RBC Royal Bank and TD Canada Trust – the two Canadian firms we reviewed last year – have done impressive work recently: RBC jumped up four points in their overall score while TD Canada Trust’s score increased by nine points. TD Canada Trust added a valuable mobile website and tablet apps for both the iPad and Android tablets. RBC, meanwhile, offers innovative next-generation features like person-to-person (P2P) payments, enabling mobile bankers to send money to their Facebook friends.
  • Canadian banks excel at guiding customers from mobile to other channels…Canadian banks earned a whopping 81 out of 100 in our cross-channel guidance category, and they achieved this by making it easy and convenient for mobile bankers to move to another touchpoint – including phone, email, and branch. For example, BMO allows customers who want to talk to someone face-to-face schedule a branch appointment directly from the firm’s iPhone app (see screenshot below).
  • …But need to improve their in-app service features. The ‘service features’ category of our benchmark is where Canadian banks fared most poorly: The Big Five earned an average score of just 38 out of 100, and no bank netted a score above 50. Digital teams at banks should tackle this by rolling out in-app alerts (sometimes called push notifications), improving contextual help in the app, and considering app-wide natural language search to help users find the content and features they are looking for.

I urge you to read the full report here. In addition, please feel free to let us know what you think in our comments section below.

 

[Images from BMO’s iPhone app show a user scheduling a branch appointment]