Mobile Adoption In Financial Services: Lack Of Awareness, Skepticism, Impatience

Typically, banks get all the attention in reports on mobile adoption in financial services. That’s as it should be, since mobile apps and banking transactions on the go are a perfect match. The investment management and insurance industries tend to bring up the rear. However, a Webinar this week presented research that included some interesting, segregated findings and consumer insights about each of the segments.

You can listen to “Deloitte’s Mobile Strategies in Financial Services: Barriers and Opportunities” in its entirety on demand, and download the slides. Also, there’s a related blog post by Jim Eckenrode, Executive Director, Deloitte Center for Financial Services, that provides this succinct summary of the findings: “Our research has found that mobile adoption across financial services has been a crazy quilt of equal parts unawareness, skepticism and impatience with financial services providers.” 

Below I’ve cherry-picked some of the more interesting statements about investment management and mobile. The findings are based on a survey that was conducted during the first two weeks of January and had a total sample of 2,193 respondents, about 22% of whom were from households with income above $100,000 per year. The sample was weighted to represent the broader U.S. smartphone population.

Calling The Call Center From A Smartphone

The consensus of the presenters and the Webinar attendees, as expressed in their response to a polling question, was that financial services has not leveraged the mobile device to any great extent.

While there’s a range of mobile services that banks can support, and insurance companies can offer account servicing and claim filing and tracking, the specifics in the presentation on what investment management firms offer via mobile was a bit light.

In fact, most non-brokerage investment apps today do little more than deliver content, replicating what can be found on the thought leadership sections of Websites, and product data, most of which can be found on any number of finance sites.

A throwaway comment—that 58% of call center interactions came from a smartphone—piqued my interest. Those of you who have this data from your own mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) operation may be well ahead of me.

Is device-appropriate client service where investment management mobile development could more meaningfully focus? Not to the exclusion of making content available but in addition to?

Any financial advisor or shareholder calling Client Services for help today on a smartphone as opposed to while in front of a desktop is likely having a subpar experience.

And yet Deloitte says mobile technology (including smartphones but also wearable technology and the Internet of things) has the potential to dramatically reshape customer engagement. It's possible to deliver a better experience to mobile users, taking advantage of the unique attributes of the channel.

As Eckenrode comments in his post, new technologies “are being added to the mobile platform that take advantage of its ability to know where it is, see what is around it, communicate with other local devices and connect with information sources that have yet to be deployed.” 

Today smartphones have onboard sensors that include accelerometers, compasses, cameras, microphones, pedometers, GPS, proximity and ambient light detectors, and gyroscopes. Future developments will likely include the ability to detect temperature, pressure, eye movement and gestures, location and magnetic fields, Eckenrode predicts.

Location-aware, Context-Specific

The Webinar discussion expanded on the importance of location-aware and context-specific experiences for mobile users.

I took a quick spin around some of investment firm mobile apps and note that just a few apps today (the screenshots show USAA, an exception) offer click-to-call capabilities. Actually, some Websites still lack clickable phone numbers for mobile visitors to use.

It’s apparent that we in this industry have a distance to travel to be in a position to offer smartphone-using advisors or others the video call support or mobile ad-hoc networks mentioned in the Webinar, for example. If you’re not making big plans already, this discussion will broaden your perspective on the mobile app and “mobility” in general.

The Status Quo

The Deloitte data provides a look at where we are today: Almost half of the survey respondents aren’t even sure whether their principal asset manager offers a mobile app.

In October 2013, the last time I took a comprehensive look at asset manager apps, I thought I detected a certain malaise regarding apps and app updates. Awareness, the presenters noted, is a prerequisite to adoption, user experience and ultimately engagement. We might tack on availability to the front of that list.

Also noteworthy from the research: 

• Only 23% of respondents said the ability to deal with their investment firm on a mobile device was extremely or very important. An advisor-only survey to advisors would produce different results. And, still, respondents would be reacting to just what they think might be delivered via mobile. Marketers could imagine and ultimately deliver more.
• More than half (54%) of investment management clients have concerns about data security over mobile devices. That’s less than bank clients (64%) but more than insurance clients (45%).  
• Survey respondents and the Webinar attendees agree that the creation of a more secure wifi or mobile network was the most appealing way to provide customers security reassurances. Eight out of 10 respondents also thought that a system that would automatically disable a stolen device would be reassuring as well.   

How Does Your Content Look In Flipboard?

This post isn’t going to be for everyone. It’s a tad technical and requires you to get your hands dirty by popping the hood and at least exploring how your Web pages are made.

You may be tempted to bounce now.

On the other hand, as marketers, we’re known for sweating the details. The color of the firm logo has to be exactly right when printed on a four-color press. Some of us insist on using the full product name in all instances, even when those names do go on and on. Banners on booths have been ripped down because a comma was out of place.

If you care about all of the above, you may be willing to hang in here to consider some issues affecting how some investment management content appears on Flipboard, one of the most popular news reading apps available for iOS (iPad and iPhone) and Android smartphones and tablets.

Some Background

More than 100 million people use Flipboard, and it's regularly included among the top 10 apps recommended for financial advisors. If you’re not familiar with it, this Putnam wholesaler’s explanation will bring you up to speed.

Essentially, Flipboard provides the equivalent of a magazine reading experience by extracting content from user-specified sources, including blogs and social network accounts, and presenting them in an attractive layout. It's a personal magazine, I love it.

Here’s how Marcos Weskamp, Flipboard’s head of design, described its inspiration to Mashable in 2012: “If there is one element I've always admired from what [magazines] do, it's how every element placed in the page has a specific purpose. I just love how each story flows into the other one, how your eye can surf each page by jumping from headline to headline to photo, to pull quote and into an article. In the magazine world, each page is a small composition of a larger piece, and everything is in a way trying to pull you in to read the story. You can easily scan a magazine, and the moment something interests you, just dive in.”

Flipboard makes subscribed-to content more inviting to read. Theoretically, content that someone chooses to read through Flipboard should get a lift from the enhanced display, often including a related image, headline and a text excerpt. It’s a rich opportunity for content providers to draw more readers in.

The screenshot below is of a Flipboard page, illustrating how Flipboard can showcase content linked to in a tweet. 

Due Diligence On Distributed Content

A few years ago we only dreamt that our content would grow wings and fly to distant places. Today broad distribution on platforms other than investment firms' own domains is effectively extending the reach of what you all have to say. And, kudos to you for originating and sharing content that attracts a following.  

But with this extended distribution comes the need to be ever-diligent that others’ publication of your content is working as expected. Unfortunately, the Flipboard experience isn't ideal for all content. The presentation of some mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) content is disadvantaged in Flipboard, primarily because of what’s being extracted from the HTML and displayed. 

This post isn’t meant to call anyone out. It’s impossible to describe what’s going on without showing a few examples of issues that are occurring regularly and keeping people from exploring the content. We all need to look out for one another.

Oh, and I should say, if there's an adjustment that needs to be made to the way your content is displaying, it's not going to be Flipboard that makes the change.

Some Specifics

I regularly use Flipboard to keep up with tweets from asset managers. You could do it, too—all that’s required is a one-time add of the Rock The Boat Marketing Investment Managers Twitter list or any select Twitter accounts or other social media accounts you’re interested in.

Obviously, my view is of 100% investment management content and may/may not be the way most advisors or investors see your content on Flipboard. They may view your tweets as part of an everything feed. That raises the level of competition for attention. Also, the page layouts are dynamic. An excerpt that takes up almost all of a page one time may be reduced in size the next time you open Flipboard.

However, the reading experience itself is always the same—the composition of each page to be flipped includes multiple entries of varying sizes and accompanying images, all pulled by Flipboard’s algorithm. More about the algorithm later.

The most appealing content is what gets attention within Flipboard and when you’re in the habit of flipping through, the typical user is unlikely to notice let alone dwell on anything sub-optimal. There’s too much interesting stuff "flowing" on any given page, the reader will move on.

What prompted this post is something that I happened to notice about a J.P. Morgan Funds item in Flipboard.

Campaign? Why would J.P. Morgan use campaign in a headline?

Clicking through the excerpt to the page on J.P. Morgan’s site confirmed that “campaign” wasn’t used in the headline. But a check of the HTML shows that “campaign” is in the metadata of this page and many other pages.

Noticing this about a month ago has made me hyperaware of how investment manager content is being displayed in the Flipboard app. Most of it looks great. Firms that are sharing images and graphics should be attracting lots of eyeballs, especially. But upon closer review, it's dismaying to see how widespread some issues are: Headings and text that firms don’t intend or expect to be published are often showing.

The problems seem limited to links to content on firms’ own Website pages and sometimes just sections of sites as opposed to links to posts on blogs. Links to other publishers’ content seem to be displaying just fine.  

Sometimes—in the instances of the Legg Mason and UBS examples below—the extract is simply underleveraging the value of what’s being shared. The most common issue is that Flipboard is extracting a navigational heading referring to a type of content (e.g., Insights, Press Releases, Education and News Center) as opposed to the unique title of the work.

More people will be drawn to a headline like, “Who’s Afraid of Rising Rates?” than Global Thought Leadership Document Gateway. And note that the content extracted in the Legg Mason example is the Website user agreement.

But certain USAA and Eaton Vance extracts show Website messages instead of content, and it’s apparent that something is not working as it should be. This is a lost opportunity, and then some.

Most of the examples shown here are from the iPad app. The Flipboard smartphone apps use the same algorithm so the result is the same but mitigated by the fact that the content of the tweet is more prominent. Still, if you know that someone is taking the time to catch up with his or her news and you have a screen to yourself with which to engage the reader, it’s a shame to fritter the opportunity as is happening in this @BlackRockUSDC example below.

Addressing The Issues

The issues involving the titles may be able to be easily addressed, probably depending on your content management system. (And just a general word of warning to be careful about the words included in your metadata. A few years ago, the FDA ruled that the same rules that govern pharmaceutical companies’ advertising, labeling and promotion also apply to metadata. I wouldn’t rule out this industry’s regulators coming to a similar conclusion.)  

I’ve sent a few of these other examples to Flipboard, hoping they could provide some guidance, but after a month they haven’t had much to say.

Flipboard extracts are based on their algorithms, which they don’t share information about.  

One commenter on Quora speculated, “The parsing and extraction can be done by looking for relevant HTML tags (e.g. <p>) which contain the more textual content than usual; they also analyze other aspects of the HTML such as relative position (main content tends to be more centrally located), tag affinity (article text tends not to be mixed with lots of other types of non-text tags). Some algorithms use more sophisticated techniques which require it to be trained on sample data.” 

To view how Flipboard is extracting your social updates, look for your social account using the Search capability in the upper right-hand corner of the app. 

If Flipboard is publishing “the wrong” content, you have three obvious choices: 

• You and your IT support will need to troubleshoot and ideally address the page-specific issues.
• If you fail to identify a way to address these, you may want to take your limitations into consideration when selecting what to tweet or otherwise share.
• You could choose to not be bothered by how Flipboard is displaying the content. 

Lots of attention right now is being paid to the Twitter profile changes, the deadline for which is May 28.

But remember that it’s a minority of Twitter users who read your tweets on your Twitter profile page. Much more likely is that they’re consuming the content you share in the app or news reader of their choice. As important as it is to make sure that the Twitter profile aligns with your brand, my recommendation is that you take care to also check out your content where and how your firm's followers are experiencing it. 

No iOS 7-Updated Mutual Fund, ETF Apps Yet

With all of the attention being paid to the mid-September release of Apple’s iOS 7, I’ve wondered how asset manager iPad (mostly) and iPhone apps weathered the updating process. Are any apps taking advantage of the drastic operating system redesign? Were any apps redesigned to reflect the more flattened look?

For answers to those and other questions, the App Details area of App Annie is a useful resource. (See a related April 11, 2013, post What Are The Most Downloaded Asset Manager iPad, Android Apps?)

After a review of the asset manager apps, it looks as if the short answer is No. While a few of the App Details for mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firm apps include updates for iOS 7 compatibility and bug-fixing, none is flagged as having been “Redesigned for iOS 7.”

This doesn’t mean that they won’t be. The redesign was unveiled only in June and not all have the capabilities to work around the clock, as other app developers have, to deliver a refresh. My guess is that most of the leaders in the Finance category are preparing redesigns in the expectation that pre-iO7 apps will begin to look, and be, dated. (If you need background on iOS 7, by the way, the iTunes Store includes a Designed for iOS 7 section.)

A handful of asset managers, including a few surprising names, haven’t updated their apps since 2012. Let's not hold our breath looking for iOS 7 updates from them, unless... The optimist in me wonders if something big is in the works, the realist makes me wonder if they're rethinking iPad development as a worthwhile activity.

The absence of iOS 7 updates notwithstanding, App Annie's App Details provide updates on the evolving state of the art of asset manager app capabilities, a few of which are highlighted below.

J.P. Morgan Insights App Climbs The Finance Chart

First, how about some respect for J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s iPad app? If your job includes mobile app development for another investment firm, you’ve probably heard all you care to hear about this app, thank you very much.

But, for the rest of us, check out how this late-starter has made up for lost time. Version 1 of Insights by J.P. Morgan Asset Management was released in May of this year and it now ranks #50 on the iPad Top Charts-United States Finance category apps.

Judging from the description of the capabilities—most of the magic happens behind an Advisor/Advisory Firm or Institution/Consultant registration requirement—this app provides an experience that’s unique to the tablet form factor.

J.P. Morgan is building on its leadership of having provided useful charts and graphs for years offline via its Guide to the Markets. It now enables registered users to create custom versions of the Guide by selecting individual slides for presentation and/or packaging them up as PDFs for clients. Awesome.

The app’s overall popularity speaks to the treasure trove of content and its usefulness for non-registered users. The downloads have to be coming from than investment professionals alone.

The image above is just a screenshot of an (un-embeddable) video of how to use the app. Click on it to go there. 

Other App Enhancements

The following are selected highlights from other reported app enhancements:

Vanguard iPad app (current release: 3.2, September 30, 2013)

• Open an account from the app
• Stay logged on for up to 15 minutes when multitasking or navigating outside the app

Vanguard for Financial Advisors iPhone and iPad apps (current release: 5.3, September 20, 2013) 

• A Briefcase feature for content storage and retrieval  
• Briefcase content is now automatically synched to Apple devices using iCloud 

USAA (current release: 5.8, October 1, 2013) 

• USAA MemberShop, enabling users to take advantage of USAA exclusive savings from merchants 

Fidelity (current release of the iPhone app: 2.2.3, October 1, 2013)

• Instantly connect to customer support by tapping “Call a Rep” 
• Home screen updates, including a U.S. Markets day trend visual 
• Real-time, streaming quote details available to customers who are Active Traders

Schwab (current release of the iPhone app: 3.2.0.298, October 3, 2013)

• Listen to the Schwab Market Update through the new Media Center button on the main panel. It’s updated throughout the day with the latest news, including a performance summary and key market mover statistics.

Ripped From The Headlines: 3 Notes For Your Mobile Strategy

The news this week produced three random reports that might help ground your mobile planning in reality.

Stand-out iPad Apps For Advisors

From Investment News, here's a video preview of some stand-out iPad apps that will be cited in the publication's upcoming vendor and technology usage report.

If your app plans call for you to port the text content that nobody reads on your advisor Website to this new medium where nobody will read it, don't take your mobile victory lap just yet. This report by technology reporter Davis Janowski highlights where the bar is moving.

Click to read more ...