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Insurance Apps are Going Deep on Customer Interaction

[from NetBanker]

Apps that help you move, record the contents of your home and their value (for insurance purposes), track your driving performance, help you plan trips - insurance companies are making sure their apps give users bang for their buck and keep them engaged. 

USAA has one app that does everything, it seems...is the multi-app strategy stronger than the all-in-one approach?

17 Things You Should Stop Doing to Your Websites

[via SEJ]

An interesting and useful list of Do's and Don'ts...mostly Don'ts. To skip ahead a bit:

17.   Stop planning – start doing

There’s a lot of internet marketing and strategy dropped on you daily – dozens of ideas and plans to implement. The big question is – are you doing it? Some people take planning so seriously, they never get down to actually implementing the useful stuff...

The rest of the list supports tighter, more focused, much easier-to-load content and page structures that make sense for all audiences. Move away from book-length swaths of content and auto-play videos and focus on what really matters - informing and enlightening an audience in less time with better content.

48% of Teens Own an iPhone, 62% Looking to Get One

[from CNN Money, via Daring Fireball]

The key findings:

• 91% of teens say they plan to buy a smartphone for their next high-tech device, up from 86% last spring and 90% last fall
• 59% of teens say they are likely to buy an iOS device (unchanged from fall) and 21% are likely to buy an Android device (was 20%)
• Among high-income families, the iOS preference rises to 70%
• 48% of teens already own an iPhone, compared with 40% last fall
• 62% of teens plan on making an iPhone their next mobile device (flat vs. fall 2012)

And more than that - 51% of teens own a tablet of some kind. 

What you should be doing with this news: 

1. Making sure your website and OLB work well and look good on mobile devices
2. Figuring out whether there's any benefit to building an app for your FI
3. Worrying about mobile payment "game changers", i.e., digital wallets, NFC money trades between business and between phones, etc.
4. Working tablets and smartphones into your giveaways that are aimed at youth markets

A Multilingual Banking App

[from CUJournal.com - Paid Subscribers Only, FYI]

River City FCU worked with Malauzai to further its mobile offering and deploy a SmartApp for the iPad. Despite a highly customized look and feel, the project was completed in 17 business days. The credit union also chose to offer a mirrored Spanish version of the SmartApp to meet the needs of current members, as well as attract new ones.

This is an interesting approach by River City FCU and Malauzai, our app partner for My Virtual StrongBox. It's one thing to have an app that switches languages based on location (i.e., showing French when you're in Paris), but this kind of functionality is imperative in areas with high concentrations of Spanish speaking persons. Building in the ability to switch is pretty nifty...and we'd bet not something a lot of app designers consider from the outset.

Mobile Traffic Increasing for Top 10 Banks

Table: U.S. desktop and mobile traffic at the top-10 busiest U.S. banks
millions of unique visitors, age 18+ (Feb 2013)

Feb 2013 (USA)	Total	Desktop	Mobile*	Mobile Only	Mobile Incremental**
Total U.S. Internet	236	221	127	14.5	7%
Banking total	102	85.1	39.1	16.4	19%
1. Bank of America	31.5	24.1	11.7	7.4	31%
2. JPMorgan Chase	28.3	21.9	9.9	6.3	29%
3. Wells Fargo	22.2	20.0	3.5	2.2	11%
4. Capital One	15.4	12.7	3.8	2.8	22%
5. Amex	15.3	12.6	3.8	2.7	21%
6. Citi	11.8	10.4	2.0	1.4	13%
7. Discover	7.8	6.5	1.7	1.3	20%
8. HSBC	6.5	5.5	1.3	1.0	19%
9. US Bank	5.5	4.8	0.9	0.7	14%
10. PNC	4.8	3.9	1.1	0.8	21%

Source: comScore, March 2013 (methodology)     

___

(via NetBanker.com)

Breune's take on the shift toward mobile banking/mobile account management: 

Bottom line: It is no surprise that mobile usage is significant. But what I didn't realize is how quickly mobile users are giving up desktop online banking. Look at Chase and BofA, which have had mobile the longest. Only 1/3 of their mobile users went to the desktop during February. Partly, that's because many are single-service credit card customers. But it's strong evidence for what many have hypothesized: once users become accustomed to mobile convenience, they have much less need for desktop access.

Why bother going to the desktop when it's all on your phone, point "A".

Point "B" - how much will mobile wallets increase this effect? If you're spending money using your phone, managing money using your phone, and updating your balances using your phone, why bother with the computer...well, ever again, really? 

The Companies and Countries Losing Their Data [HBR Blog]

 

A study by KPMG unpacks how data is lost, and by whom. The results are pretty staggering - in financial services, roughly 65% of data is lost thanks to hacking and fraud. According to the chart above, nearly half of all data lost worldwide comes from the US. 

Time to recommit to backups, security and personal data integrity. 

[Click to read the full story on the HBR blog.]

Mailbox: Worth the weeks of wait? (Yes, yes it is.)

by Jimmy Marks

I downloaded the Mailbox app after months of waiting for its release. To my surprise, when I got the app, there was a wait list more than a quarter of a million people deep. I didn't know what stunned me more - the line in front of me or the line that eventually queued up behind me. When I finally got my "reservation" "filled", I was ahead of more than 800,000 hopefuls, waiting for their own launch day. 

Mailbox gained notoriety for the use of this reservation system, deployed to help keep their servers from crashing outright due to the enormous scale. I found this interesting from a technology standpoint and annoying from a user's standpoint. I'm Veruca Salt when it comes to apps and technology - "I want it NOW!"

After a three week wait (at a rate, I decided, of around 448 accounts activated every hour), I finally got my shot. 

Initial Reaction

First and foremost - this is a beautiful app. Clean, cool, easy-to-use...icons that make sense and actions that are easy to do. The app did a good job training me in the basics, right up front. Want to save an email in your "all mail" folder? Swipe right. Want to delete an email? Swipe right and hold. Swipe left and hold to move that email into a curated category from a selected list. Swipe left quickly and you get a block of options for "snoozing" that email. 

The "snooze" feature was what drew me to the app in the first place. I get so many emails at home AND at work and I know certain messages need full attention that don't receive it. So what do I do? 

I swipe and choose a time frame to deal with that message. That night? A week from today? "Someday"? A specific date and time? It's up to me. 

The long-hand version of this is setting a calendar reminder, but as a victim of Outlook, I can tell you that Mailbox's approach is much better. Who wants to open three windows and get pestered by twenty different automated reminders going off on the day something's due? I'll always prefer the "set it and forget it" approach. 

Another great moment came when I closed the app to view the home screen on my phone and saw a "new messages" bubble above the icon. 3,600 new messages?!? I went back into the app to see what I had to do about marking all those messages as "unread". 

But something amazing happened. The app informed me that the messages weren't unread emails - they were conversations in my Gmail inbox. Their way of dealing with it? Move those conversations to the "all mail" folder, a Gmail feature that I wish more mail providers would adopt. Why?

 

According to the principals of "Inbox Zero", the inbox is a place where messages should be read and then acted upon, either by archiving, replying, or deleting. Mailbox uses the Gmail setup of inbox and archive to help you get to zero quickly and begin developing good habits. What's funny is that, in five years of reading about and striving toward Inbox Zero, I'd never even considered using the archive in that way. Mailbox made it easy and sent all  my old email to the archive. Done and done. 

When that happened, I got a friendly little "congrats!" message from the app. Woo! Positive reinforcement! Now let's just hope I keep my inbox that neat and tidy. 

Things I Wish Were Different

Well, for starters, Mailbox only bothers with Gmail accounts. Have two Gmail accounts? Great. Have a Gmail AND an Exchange account? Tough, Gmail only. And my Exchange account could sorely use this kind of streamlining. On their website (linked above), Mailbox's creators say they hope to roll out "premium features" that users would paid for in a few months. If they said I had to pay $25 to roll in my Exchange account, I'd gladly do just that. 

Another thing: I have several email addresses that I manage using my Gmail account as a catchall. As best I can tell, Mailbox doesn't allow me to send from these addresses. Sure, the emails still come in, but I can't choose to send from any other alias, which stinks on ice. I'm sure they'll get to it with time, but the sooner the better for my taste. 

Mailbox can't handle Gmail's labels, but you can create lists based on your current labels (All Things Digital seems to think it's a bit tedious, I haven't really bothered with it yet.). You also don't get your Priority Inbox, but I've never used that anyway, so...no harm, no foul. 

If I had to put together a wishlist of what Mailbox should do next, it would be: 

1. Multi-source Integration (for Yahoo, Exchange, AOL, Outlook, etc.)
2. An iPad app (so that you can finally justify buying an iPad as a second monitor/workspace on-the-go)
3. Ability to send and receive emails from different addresses as you can through Gmail

Related Reading

• A few articles popped out at me as I did my research on Mailbox. This  "Terms & Conditions" piece over at Digital Trends reads through, what else, the terms and conditions agreement for Mailbox. Their rating? Pretty good, if you only look at the app and not Gmail's side of it. 
• Most of the reviews I've read follow this one from Gizmag: great app, but that wait is a killer. My take? Yeah, it was a long wait, but worth it. And once you're on the other side of that wait, why gripe about it anymore?

I think with a little more time and a little more money, Mailbox will turn into the go-to email client for folks with hundreds of emails to contend with every day. I love it already and I'm only using it one inbox. A zeroed-out, ready-to-rock inbox, that is.

But until everyone can get it at once? Waiters gonna wait, haters gonna hate.

 

Square Wallet Provides a Sneak Peek at the Future of Proximity Payments

From NetBanker's "Mobile Monday": 

But this post is about the other side of Square's two-sided market, its mobile wallet for consumers. I've already written about Square's gift card option launched right before the holidays, but I hadn't used the wallet for day-to-day charges.

In surveys, consumers don't yet see the value of a mobile wallet. Mobile payments are looking to replace a plastic-card system that works very, very well. And who's costs, so far, are mostly hidden from consumers

We have a Square reader here at the Herndon office. I'm not certain you could use Square Wallet for the "day-to-day charges", unless you're at a Starbucks. It's not widely adopted enough yet to be much more than a trinket. 

But it's a pretty cool trinket... -JM

[NetBanker] 

Why 2013 Could Be The End Of The U.S. Postal Service (via FastCompany)

from Fast Company:

The U.S. Postal Service lost nearly $16 billion in 2012, and now its Inspector General tells the Guardian newspaper that the service, which is responsible for processing 168 billion pieces of mail per year, could go out of business unless it is approved for a bailout by Congress.

The rock and the hard place are about to meet. And it won't be pretty.

Kill the Password: Why a String of Characters Can't Protect Us Anymore

This summer I learned how to get into, well, everything. With two minutes and $4 to spend at a sketchy foreign website, I could report back with your credit card, phone, and Social Security numbers and your home address. Allow me five minutes more and I could be inside your accounts for, say, Amazon, Best Buy, Hulu, Microsoft, and Netflix. With yet 10 more, I could take over your AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon. Give me 20—total—and I own your PayPal. Some of those security holes are plugged now. But not all, and new ones are discovered every day.

Mat Honan, whose entire digital life was picked apart by hackers, has some thoughts on password security, fighting the last war, and what we can do to make it better.

[Full article at Wired.com]