Keynova Group, the principal competitive intelligence source for digital financial services firms, today announced the results of the Q4 2022 edition of its semi-annual Online Banker Scorecard. Bank of America continued its winning streak, ranking No. 1 with the highest Overall Score for its digital user experience in Keynova Group’s competitive evaluation of 20 leading U.S. retail banks. The Scorecard’s findings show that top-ranked banks are delivering more advanced digital money movement options and personalized financial management tools with relevant and consumable information. More than half of banks (55%) now offer next generation financial health monitors with streamlined reporting and visuals.
"As digital banking continues to evolve into a centralized hub for consumer financial management, customers expect day-to-day online banking tools to be not only informative but intuitive and actionable," said Susan Foulds, managing director of Keynova Group. "Banks are responding to customers’ appetite for comprehensive and automated money management tools that consolidate transactions into summary reports from all of their financial accounts to provide a complete picture of cash flow and expenses.”
Key Findings:
Banks Now Set the Pace for Digital Money Movement Options
Digital banking has experienced a sea change in payments in recent years, evolving beyond bill pay, inter-institutional transfers (ITT), and wires to offer Zelle and faster ACH funds transfers. Overall, 55% of the evaluated banks now offer next-day ACH for expedited external transfers. An innovator in online banking payments, Citi is the first bank in the Scorecard to offer retail customers real-time payments with instant delivery to consumers via the RTP network. The bank also sports an innovative payments and transfers user interface with colorful tiles and icons to differentiate and provide guidance on appropriate money movement options.
While Zelle is well-established for person-to-person (P2P) payments and is effectively competing with standalone P2P apps, 25% of the evaluated banks don’t offer Zelle payments through online banking even though all offer the service via their mobile apps (Keynova Q3 2022 Mobile Banker Scorecard). Zelle limits are generally higher since the pandemic, and nearly half of the 15 online banking sites that offer Zelle maintain daily limits of $2500 or higher. Monthly limits are also higher: 40% of banks support a $10-20K monthly Zelle limit, and 20% now support monthly Zelle transfer limits of $20K or more.
Improved Financial Management Tools Now Widely Available from Top-Ranked Banks
Today’s next-gen financial management tools are more consumer-friendly and require less user effort to swiftly view summary-level spending, budgets, or cash position. Currently, 60% of banks offer spending reports that automatically categorize transactions, and 30% go a step further to enable users to assign their own personalized category labels. Since the ability to import transactions from external accounts provides a complete view of expenditures by category, 35% of banks now enable users to link external accounts to consolidate transactions into spending reports. Half of the evaluated banks also allow users to assign rules that will automatically categorize future posted transactions to minimize customer effort.
Usability elements that help consumers more easily keep tabs on available cash is an area of opportunity, with only 50% of banks displaying the total balance for all deposit accounts on the summary screen. Yet, just 15% of banks—PNC, TD Bank, Truist—currently display a total amount of scheduled or upcoming transactions on the account summary or transaction details page.
About the Online Banker Scorecard
Keynova Group’s semi-annual, fact-based Online Banker Scorecard, offered for more than two decades, evaluates digital user capabilities, customer experience elements, and best practices to identify evolving trends and insights that drive mobile strategy in banking. The evaluation encompasses the websites of Bank of America, Bank of the West, BMO Harris, Capital One, Chase, Citibank, Citizens Bank, Fifth Third Bank, Huntington Bank, KeyBank, M&T Bank, PNC, Regions Bank, Santander, TD Bank, Truist, Union Bank, USAA, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo. For more information please visit: https://www.keynovagroup.com/scorecards/#banking
Keynova Group is the nation’s foremost competitive intelligence firm providing trusted benchmarking insights and analysis of consumer and small business digital financial services, including banking, credit card, home lending and insurance. Since 1999, Keynova Group’s Scorecards have served as the go-to source for leading financial services firms to obtain reliable competitive intelligence and actionable insights. The firm’s proven methodology and highly detailed results help its clients maximize the value of their digital channels to deliver a premier experience to customers and prospects.