BankMobileSmartphone First Impressions

By David Gerbino for The Financial Brand

My BankMobile journey began at the app store.

When downloading for your Android tablet, the app store

will let you know the app is “Designed for phones.”

This is the screen that greets all users of of the BankMobile app.

After 5 screens extolling the virtues of BankMobile,

one simply touches the "Sign up" icon

to begin the account opening process.

Enter your email twice.

Review the disclosures and agreements.

Select single or joint account ownership.

The first screen that starts the Drivers License scan.

The app lets you know that each scan

is complete with a green check.

The app has you review/edit the data it captured from your drivers license.

It also asks you to manually add your SSN#, mother's maiden name,

number of years at your physical address and to add your phone number.

The process continues with you selecting

three security questions from a list.

After you answer a few KYC type questions and answer them correctly,

you can proceed to creating your username and password.

After you successfully create your username and password,

your account is open and ready for funding.

You can "Fund later" or "Fund now".

I selected "Fund Now" and had to accept

the Mobile Terms and Conditions.

My funding options were “Deposit a check,”

“Transfer from another bank”

or “Fund later.” I went with ACH.

After I filled out the information to transfer my funds from

another bank, the app told me my funds will be available soon.

After I completed the funding process

I noticed I had an email from BankMobile

welcoming me to the “Banking Revolution.”

This the the top part of the menu structure

inside the app after logging in.

This is the lower part of the menu structure inside the app.

Note: There is no settings icon. I expected one to get access to additional features like setting

up a pin and other functions. The Android version of the app calls it "Customer Service." To me

that is not intuitive. I think it should have been called settings.

The iPhone and iPad versions do not have the customer service menu option.

To get to the extra options side scroll the black icons left and right.

Customer Service options: There are a lot of additional features here.

Goto settings to setup auto login to turn on PIN access.

Auto login is how you get access to your balance without logging in.

I really like the way BankMobile vis-a-vis Malazuai Software

implemented this. You touch the BankMobile icon to launch the app...

...and the app retrieves your balance and

upto your last 15 transactions.

The educational portal is a great idea but poorly executed, especially on Android. I was not

going to read a bunch of content with tiny text. I expect in a future release they will make this

better. I shared my thoughts on a better method. You should too at byob@bankmobile.com - I

told them to look at the content technique that Google used for their Primer app.

Final Thoughts

The team at BankMobile has done a greatbjob adding to the Malauzai Software mobile banking

platform with their middleware additions for joint accounts and personal line of credit. The primary

banking functions are solid despite some user interface issues. Between the feedback from the

BankMobile users and Malauzai’s own efforts of improving their own user interface stack (see Monkey

Insights Mobile Banking Smart Device Usage December 2014) I expect a more polished experience in

a few months. Hopefully they adopt a rapid improvement process to resolve these issues. I also hope

Malauzai Software’s knowledge of Android programming gets up to par with that of iOS. The Android

app is currently “Designed for phones.” I did expect the Android app to include tablet optimizations

since there is an iPad app.