Bank of the West has made personal financial management (PFM) capabilities an integral part of its online banking portal.
The update went live May 11 and was made public late last week, said Jamie Armistead, executive vice president and head of digital channels. Armistead said the change constituted an overhaul of not just the user-facing front end, but the middleware surrounding the transactional core, as well. This improved response time and site performance generally, said Vivian Yeung, head of online banking and payments.
Ron Shevlin argues in his book Smart Bank that PFM isn’t part of the future of banking — it is the future of banking. This is because the opportunity for banks to deliver value is in helping customers better manage their money.
The new Bank of the West online banking experience features a landing page after login that presents a dashboard view of the user’s finances, showing accounts and balances, and a pie chart of spending. Unlike traditional PFM, users can transact from this page, moving money between accounts or sending money to friends. Importantly, and unusually for a bank, transactions are tagged and categorized automatically.
Surveys show users don’t care much for this activity, and, therefore, don’t care much for PFM. But innovators like Level Money (bought by Capital One last January) and MX have moved the industry toward automatic tagging of data, which could help push PFM adoption to those who need it most — millennials.
“The whole concept was to allow customers to take advantage of the information and concepts of PFM without making them do a lot of work,” Armistead said.
From a design standpoint, the bank switched from tab-based navigation to menus. Along with the dashboard, this allows users to see more information more quickly. The design also extends to browser-based tablet experience, which is more popular than using the banks’ app on a tablet, Armistead said, noting this was consistent with what he had heard from other FIs.
The bank set up a microsite to help educate customers about the new functionality through short videos (see below), Yeung said. There was also extensive training for call center and branch employees to support the new site rollout.
“There is absolutely an opportunity to bring this functionality to mobile,” Armistead said, but he also pointed out the continued importance of online banking, which has twice as many customers as mobile banking. Malauzai, which designs mobile banking products, also recently launched a desktop experience, and indicated that its bank customers were beginning to put some attention and mobile learnings to use on the desktop, after a period of neglect.
Bank of the West is a Fiserv customer and worked closely with the technology vendor on the update. The depth of work that went into this update should help speed up future front-end enhancements, Yeung said.
“We’re in a good position to continue to make improvements,” she said.