Analysis of ICBC's competitive products!

With the continuous penetration of the Internet into the real economy and the advancement of technology, the main battlefield of bank retail business has gradually shifted from offline physical outlets to mobile banking apps. On December 18, 2018, China Merchants Bank, known as the "King of Retail" in the industry, disclosed to the public: "The 'comprehensive cardless transformation' project of branches across the country has been completed, making it the first bank in China to achieve comprehensive cardless transformation of branches." This move marks that the banking industry has entered the "App era" from the "card era".

Affected by the COVID-19 epidemic, residents' work, study and lifestyles were fully online in 2020, giving rise to new business forms such as home economy and contactless services. During the epidemic, major banks have provided users with contactless online and digital financial services, and the position of mobile banking as the main battlefield for the digital transformation of retail finance has been further consolidated.

This article selects the China Construction Bank App and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China App as the analysis objects, and compares the two apps horizontally from the aspects of business strategy, functional architecture, and interactive design, hoping to provide reference suggestions for the iterative optimization of mobile banking.

1. Product Overview

1. Product Overview and Version

(1) China Construction Bank App

The China Construction Bank App is a mobile client specially developed by China Construction Bank for individual users. It was officially launched in October 2010.

Trial version: China Construction Bank App V 5.5.1

(2) ICBC App

The ICBC App is one of the multiple mobile clients created by ICBC for individual users. It was officially launched in March 2011.

Competitive version: ICBC App V 6.1.0.6.0

2. Experience the environment

• Device model: Huawei P20
• Operating system: Android 10 EMUI 10.0.0
• Experience network: Mobile 4G

3. Reasons for selection

The reasons for choosing these two apps are as follows:

First, both banks belong to the first tier of state-owned commercial banks. Commercial banks are enterprises engaged in monetary and credit business. The nature of their business determines that credit risk is the main risk they face. State-owned commercial banks, because they are backed by the state (Ministry of Finance, Central Huijin Investment Co., Ltd.) and have strong assets, are considered by the market to be more resistant to risks and are the preferred choice when consumers conduct financial transactions. China Construction Bank and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China both belong to the four major state-owned banks. This not only means that they enjoy similar development resources and social status, but also means that, compared with city commercial banks and private banks, they all have to bear the responsibility of maintaining the stability of the financial system, so the restrictions they face in terms of systems, policies, etc. when making decisions are similar.

Second, these two mobile banking apps are positioned as mobile financial channels for individual users. The China Construction Bank App is the bank’s only online retail financial portal that is currently undergoing continuous iteration and updates. ICBC also operates multiple online portals for individual users, including Rong Ehang (internal name, externally known as the ICBC App), Rong Elian, Rong Elian, and ICBC e-Wallet. The ICBC App focuses on financial services.

Third, the market performance of these two apps is similar. In the 2020 personal mobile banking app rankings of evaluation agencies such as iResearch, Aurora Big Data, Trustdata, and Questmobile, the number of monthly active users of the China Construction Bank App ranked first in the banking industry. In the ranking compiled by Zero One Think Tank based on third-party data, ICBC App ranked first. Although different institutions have different statistical calibers, the market indicators of these two apps are basically indistinguishable.

To sum up, the CCB App and ICBC App are suitable for comparative analysis as competing products.

2. Industry Analysis

1. Overall situation of mobile banking

With the popularization of mobile Internet and smart terminals, mobile banking apps have become an important channel for commercial banks to promote retail transformation.

Source: 2020 Banking User Experience Survey Report

Among all online and offline channels, mobile banking apps have become the preferred way for users to conduct business. According to data from the Bank User Experience Joint Laboratory, the proportion of users using mobile banking apps, online banking, WeChat official accounts, and WeChat mini-programs to handle banking business in 2020 has increased compared to 2019. Among them, mobile banking apps increased by 15.9% year-on-year, becoming the channel with the highest usage rate.

Source: Analysys Qianfan

Data analysis by Analysys Qianfan shows that major commercial banks have driven the continued growth of mobile banking app users through business strategies such as human sea tactics, marketing channel expansion, and sinking of application scenarios. As of the first quarter of 2021, the number of active users of mobile banking apps has reached 584 million, a year-on-year increase of 23.8%.

Source: "2020 Q4 Mobile Banking Digital Operation Report" jointly released by China Electronic Banking Network and Analysys Qianfan

From the perspective of different bank types, due to their strong credit endorsement capabilities, abundant assets, and strong technical strength, the mobile banking of large state-owned banks generally has obvious advantages in the scale of active users compared with joint-stock banks and city commercial banks.

Source: 2020 Banking User Experience Survey Report

From the perspective of user cognition, sense of security and operating experience have always been the two indicators that users pay most attention to. The importance of performance and application scope has increased in the past two years, while the ranking of function has continued to decline.

Source: 2020 Banking User Experience Survey Report

From the perspective of user satisfaction, sense of security has scored the highest in all evaluation dimensions in recent years. As an advantage of mobile banking apps, this should continue to be maintained and consolidated. In contrast, users pay more attention to operating experience, performance and application scope, but their satisfaction is relatively low. Future mobile phones urgently need to improve these three aspects, especially the operating experience.

For state-owned commercial banks, a sense of security is an advantage, but how to improve the operational experience is a challenge. On the one hand, state-owned banks have the endorsement of the state, and on the other hand, they have advantages in talent teams and technological accumulation. Therefore, they have a first-mover advantage in financial security and information security, which is conducive to online customer acquisition. However, due to the long decision-making process, many communication barriers, and assessments that focus on KPIs rather than user orientation, operational experience and application performance are relatively weak points, and in-depth research is needed on how to further improve user experience.

Summary: The pace of online transformation of bank retail business is accelerating, and mobile banking apps have become the preferred method for individual users among all channels. Snack Finance’s digital customer acquisition and operational capabilities continue to increase, and its user base maintains a growth momentum. State-owned commercial banks need to break down existing barriers and work hard to optimize the user experience of mobile banking apps.

2. Specific performance of the two competing products

After understanding the development status and trends of mobile banking apps from a macro perspective, we will take a closer look at the market performance of the CCB and ICBC apps from the perspective of specific institutions.

Source: Chan Dashi, Analysys Qianfan, Zero One Think Tank, compiled by the author

Note: The total score is calculated by Zero One Think Tank based on the number of monthly active users, average daily launches, and app store reputation scores.

After sorting out the relevant data, the author found that the overall performance of the ICBC App ranked first in the industry in 2020, and the China Construction Bank App followed closely behind in second place. Judging from specific indicators, the download volume and average monthly active users of these two mobile banking apps are ahead of their peers, but their IOS App Store scores are lower than the average of the top ten institutions (3.89). This shows that although the scale of mobile users of these two banks ranks high in the industry, their user experience is far from satisfactory.

3. Business Strategy Analysis

1. Bank mobile strategy

First of all, from the perspective of corporate strategy, China Construction Bank and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China were both relatively early institutions in China to propose retail finance-related strategies. In 2006, both proposed the strategic goal of becoming leading retail banks. Among them, CCB is the first commercial bank in China to launch mobile banking.

Specifically for the mobile channels of retail finance, China Construction Bank proposed a mobile-first development strategy in early 2015, vigorously developing mobile financial services represented by mobile banking. ICBC also released the "E-icbc" strategy in March 2015, and the "E-icbc 2.0" upgrade strategy in September of the same year, gradually building a relatively complete Internet financial service platform and business operation system. In 2018, ICBC launched the Smart Bank ECOS construction project, taking "openness" as its core feature to promote the integration and symbiosis of banks and the ecosystem, hoping to achieve the transformation from channel electronicization to a new open and cooperative ecosystem.

Both CCB and ICBC have many apps. The author focused on the apps of the two banks that are still being iterated and updated as of August 2021 and serve domestic individual users. Let’s first look at the situation of ICBC:

According to this standard, ICBC has five active apps serving individual users, namely the "Three Rongs and One Active" managed by the head office (namely Rong Ehang, Rong Elian, Rong Eshopping and ICBC eLife) and Rong ELife launched by ICBC Shenzhen. Among them, ICBC e-Life and Rong e-Life are very similar in name, but one is the credit card client of the head office, while the other is a mobile financial life circle operated by local branches. This is because the head office and branches failed to coordinate well when planning the mobile ecosystem, which resulted in raising the threshold for users to recognize the brand.

In fact, many users online complain that ICBC has too many apps and it is difficult to tell them apart. This not only increases the difficulty of cognition and selection for new users when downloading the App, but also requires old users to pay additional operation and memory costs to use complete financial services. For example, the “Message Center” of the ICBC App does not have the most important “Account Change Notification”. Although netizens have been complaining about this for years, ICBC still stubbornly requires users to download the Rong E Lian App to receive account change notifications.

Judging from the product development history, ICBC has the awareness of streamlining the mobile entrance, but it needs to continue its efforts. In 2017, after launching the "E-icbc" strategy, ICBC gradually removed several head office-level apps such as direct banking and iPad online banking, and streamlined them to the current "three integrations and one activity" according to core businesses and scenarios. The product matrix of “three integrations and one activation” has been maintained to this day, but it can no longer meet users’ requirements for operational experience. ICBC should further integrate its internal resources, and at least merge the two apps, ICBC and Rong E Lian, to improve users' experience in receiving account change messages.

From the same perspective, the author also investigated the six apps that China Construction Bank is still updating and open to individual users. China Construction Bank does not have the same flaw in its product layout as the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, that is, it did not separate the account change notification, an essential link in the chain of residents' daily financial needs, into a separate App. Therefore, CCB users complain less about the excessive number of mobile entrances than ICBC users.

However, CCB's decision to make local life services and mobile shopping into separate apps is an inefficient use of resources. In recent years, Internet companies such as ByteDance and Meituan, after satisfying users' high-frequency demands for short videos, local services, etc. and gaining traffic advantages, have launched payment products such as Douyin Wallet and Meituan Monthly Payment, using high frequency to beat low frequency and seize users' demand for payment based on scenarios. The inspiration for mobile banking apps is to reduce inefficient and repetitive app construction, integrate local life, shopping and other scenarios with mobile financial services into a platform, and provide users with one-stop services for life consumption and fund management.

The construction of mobile banking apps is not simply about moving online finance to mobile clients, but about using mobile Internet thinking to reconstruct the financial service system, shifting from focusing only on security to taking into account a comprehensive approach to security, user experience, performance, and application scenarios, and providing mobile financial services based on user pain points.

Summary: Both ICBC and CCB have room to further streamline and integrate their mobile portals. Among them, ICBC received more complaints from users because it separated the essential link of account change notification from the main mobile financial service platform. It was suggested that the two apps, Rong E Bank and Rong E Lian, be integrated. Although CCB's current C-end product layout has no flaws in meeting consumers' daily financial needs, the coexistence of multiple apps is not conducive to integrated customer acquisition operations. In order to improve resource utilization efficiency, the three apps of CCB, Shanrong Business, and CCB Life can be further integrated into a one-stop comprehensive financial service platform.

2. Product positioning

From the perspective of business positioning, the CCB App has a stronger channel color, while the ICBC App is more inclined to operate as a platform.

In the 2020 annual report, CCB analyzed its mobile banking app as part of the mobile finance component of electronic channel construction. With the mission of "CCB on mobile phone", CCB relies on the empowerment of financial technology and is committed to providing users with digital, intelligent, personalized, anytime, anywhere, convenient and fast comprehensive financial services, continuously improving user experience and making mobile banking the first point of contact for users to enjoy CCB's digital financial services.

ICBC, on the other hand, describes its personal online services (including Rong E Bank) as a branch of its Internet financial business (the other two branches are government digitalization and industrial Internet). In the online matrix of personal customers, ICBC takes Rong E-Bank as the main battlefield, and strives to connect and integrate service elements such as products, businesses, organizations, and employees, promote online and offline integrated collaboration, form stronger comprehensive service capabilities, and maximize platform value, customer value, merchant value, and service value.

Summary: CCB makes greater use of technological innovation to create mobile financial service channels and enhance user experience; while ICBC regards mobile phones as the core of the online matrix for individual customers, actively connecting and coordinating with other apps, H5, mini programs and even offline outlets.

3. Customer acquisition strategy

The core of the banking business model is to cover as many people as possible and meet the target users' needs for financial services. Therefore, the primary goal of mobile banking in business operations is to establish its own customer acquisition.

In terms of customer acquisition, CCB adheres closely to the digital business strategy of "building an ecosystem, setting up scenarios, and expanding users."

Among them, in terms of "building an ecosystem and setting up scenarios", CCB has created model rooms for user accounts, digital payments, scenario marketing, etc. to enhance the ecosystem's customer acquisition capabilities; explored vertical ecological business models around key areas such as elderly care, housing, travel, and communities; and used digital content and event operations as a means to enhance interactive connections with users.

In terms of "expanding users", CCB is building a digitally driven "layered + grouped" personal customer management system, forming a digital business closed loop and agile iteration mechanism from customer insights, product matching to channel reach, evaluation and monitoring, promoting user-customer continuous operation, and improving the full range of personal customer service coverage and value conversion results.

In this regard, ICBC continues to promote the "first personal financial bank" strategy, building a new online customer acquisition ecosystem with "ICBC e-Wallet" as the carrier, and promoting online, digital and intelligent business transformation around key consumer markets such as elderly care, automobiles, leasing, education, and home improvement. ICBC e-Wallet is a comprehensive online retail business service solution launched by ICBC to its partners based on the central bank's personal banking electronic account classification management system. According to the 2020 ICBC annual report, the total number of ICBC's individual customers has reached 680 million, the MAU of online finance is the first to exceed 100 million among peers, and the number of personal mobile banking users has exceeded 416 million.

Source: ICBC 2020 Annual Report

In comparison, the customer acquisition strategies of the two mobile banking services are similar, and both focus on building scenarios and ecosystems. This is closely related to the current Internet competition landscape. In traditional online financial services, large banks can rely on government endorsement, dense branches, and strong assets to establish their image among investors and thereby acquire customers.

However, in the consumer Internet, Internet platforms focus on user pain points, reach and capture users through high-frequency scenarios such as e-commerce, food delivery, and live streaming, enhance user stickiness, and then share users' consumer finance needs. Faced with the challenges of Internet platforms, financial institutions such as ICBC and CCB have been expanding non-financial scenarios in their respective mobile banking apps and jointly building a customer acquisition ecosystem with external partners.

Summary: In terms of customer acquisition, both CCB and ICBC emphasize acquiring customers through digital operations and building collaborative ecosystems, and both attach importance to tapping into the full value of customers.

4. User Profile

Source: Baidu Index

In terms of geographical distribution, the number of users of the ICBC App is ahead of that of the CCB App in the top ten provinces. Among them, in Guangdong Province, which has always been at the top of the list of provinces in economic development, the former has surpassed the latter with an absolute advantage.

In economically developed regions such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Zhejiang, ICBC also has obvious advantages.

Source: Baidu Index

Judging from the demographics, the differences between the customer groups of these two mobile banking apps are not very obvious. In terms of age, the user groups of both are mainly concentrated in the age group of 20-39 years old (accounting for more than 75%). The number of female users of ICBC App (36.72%) is slightly higher than that of CCB App (33.98%).

Summary: The number of users of ICBC App is greater than that of CCB App in many provinces, and the advantage is even more obvious in economically developed regions. However, in terms of the number of people, there is no obvious difference between these two state-owned banks.

4. Underlying technological strength

Financial technology strength is the core driving force for banks to promote the intelligent and digital transformation of retail business. Therefore, the author believes that when analyzing the competitiveness of mobile banking apps, a horizontal comparison of financial technology investment is indispensable.

Source: CCB and ICBC 2020 annual reports

In terms of investment in financial technology, CCB and ICBC are on par with each other. ICBC's investment is larger in absolute terms, but CCB's investment accounts for a larger proportion of its revenue, and it is more willing to spend money. In terms of financial technology personnel, CCB has made greater efforts to attract talent, and the talent growth rate is much higher than that of ICBC. However, ICBC has a clear advantage over CCB in terms of the total number of scientific and technological personnel and the proportion of their total employees.

Source: Compiled from CCB and ICBC 2020 annual reports

From the two banks' explanations on financial technology in their 2020 annual reports, it can be seen that both CCB and ICBC attach great importance to the top-level design of financial technology strategies, promote digital transformation from a global perspective, and implement differentiated financial technology strategies based on their respective situations.

Let’s take a closer look at the application of financial technology in mobile banking.

In the 5.0 version of CCB's mobile banking, users can wake up the intelligent voice interaction service by saying "Banke Banke", which is the application of intelligent voice technology; they can customize their own mobile banking interface according to their preferences, usage scenarios and common functions, which is based on digital technologies such as edge computing to provide users with personalized services; special groups such as the elderly and the visually impaired can use information accessibility services to solve the pain points of not being able to see or hear clearly.

In the 6.0 version of mobile banking, ICBC was the first in the industry to launch digital human services, where users can apply for self-service card registration and transfer authorization online; the intelligent voice service has been upgraded through corpus training, and the business coverage rate has increased from 70% to 85%; it was the first in the industry to introduce contactless authentication technology. When users log in using gesture passwords, the second identity authentication is completed imperceptibly through modeling and analysis of behavioral data such as movements, achieving double security protection.

Summary: Mobile banking apps are a concentrated display window for banks’ financial technology capabilities. Judging from capital investment and the scale of scientific and technological talents, ICBC is slightly better than CCB in terms of the underlying technical strength of mobile banking.

5. Product Function Analysis

1. Product iteration

First, from a historical perspective, the major version iteration cycle of the ICBC App is more obvious than that of the CCB App.

From version 2.0 to version 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0, the China Construction Bank App went through approximately 4, 3, and 4 years respectively. In comparison, the ICBC App has gone from being stable for three years to launching a major version every other year on average, from version 3.0 to version 6.0. This shows that ICBC has gradually improved its version planning system when developing mobile banking, and can plan future version iterations in advance and carry out major version iterations in a relatively stable manner.

Then, the author selected January 2015 to August 2021 as the time span, collected the logs of the Construction Bank and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China App from Qimai.com, and performed word segmentation, cleaning, and word frequency statistical analysis on them .

Why start from 2015? First, WeChat Pay, with its marketing innovation of distributing red envelopes during the 2015 CCTV Spring Festival Gala, "overtook" Alipay in a market structure where the market share was about 80% at the time, which was a landmark event in reshaping the mobile payment market; second, both CCB and ICBC began to implement mobile retail finance strategies in the same year.

Data shows that the iterations of the China Construction Bank App are more focused on adding new features, optimizing functions, and adjusting product accounts. In its iteration log, the top-ranked keywords are “new” (240 times), “feature” (233 times), “support” (90 times), “product” (73 times), and “account” (70 times). This shows that CCB mainly invests resources to expand the functional applications of its mobile banking.

This iterative focus does not respond to user needs. As mentioned earlier, when using mobile banking, sense of security and operational experience are the two indicators that users pay the most attention to, while the attention to functions has been on a downward trend in recent years. However, CCB did the opposite and focused on adding new functions. Furthermore, some of the new functions added by CCB are designed to serve B-side customers such as small and micro enterprises and farmers. For example, version 4.2.0 optimizes the small and micro enterprise credit quick loan, and version 4.3.6.001 adds the "Yunong Quick Loan" function.

The filling of these B-end services is not in line with the design principle of Internet products that pursue simplicity, and also blurs the product positioning of mobile banking services for C-end users.

In terms of product iteration, the ICBC App has similar problems as the CCB App - more resources are used to develop functions, and the keyword "function" ranks first with 200 occurrences. However, ICBC has its own highlights. For a long time, it has been optimizing basic functions such as "remittance" (word frequency 144 times) and "transfer" (word frequency 116 times).

The author believes that mobile banking is not about copying and moving the bank's offline business to mobile devices, but about redesigning online financial services based on the mobile Internet environment, respecting user behavior habits, and promoting security and ultimate user experience as the primary principle.

As mobile phone screens are relatively small and users usually access the phone anytime and anywhere, users tend to use more basic services such as transfers, remittances, and detailed inquiry. These services should be continuously refined to provide the ultimate experience for the broadest user base. For non-mass businesses such as precious metal trading, we can conduct targeted marketing to target customers who are more likely to purchase the services based on the customer tag system and resource position system, so as to prevent the mobile banking interface from being too complicated and preventing users from finding the functions they want.

Summary: In product iteration, both the CCB and ICBC apps invested more resources in adding new features, and did not give higher priority to improving user experience. The highlight of the ICBC App in its iterations is that it can continuously optimize basic financial services such as remittances and transfers.

2. Functional architecture

Overall, the functional architecture of the CCB App is more complex than that of the ICBC App.

On the main interface, both mobile banking apps use the bottom tab navigation bar design. After entering the App, CCB is divided into five first-level directories according to the bottom navigation bar: "Home (default page), Credit Card, Investment and Financial Management, Enjoy Life, and My"; ICBC is divided into five parts: "Favorites (default page), Credit Card, Smart Financial Management, Benefit Selection, and My". Although the names are different, the contents of the five sections are fundamentally the same.

However, in addition to the tab navigation bar at the bottom of the main interface, the CCB App also has a second floor (accessible by pulling down on any section), a side navigation bar on the second floor, a sidebar with a “≡” in the upper left corner of each channel, and a palace-style navigation for each section. However, there is a large degree of duplication among the lower-level entrances in these navigations. For example, the second floor mainly displays the entrance to micro-applications (similar to WeChat mini-programs), and the secondary entrance to the micro-application is also integrated in the menu in the upper left corner of each section.

The original purpose of navigation is to help users quickly locate the functions they want to use. However, the design of the CCB App is for navigation diversity. This results in too many entrances, which in turn increases the user's cognitive cost.

In comparison, the ICBC App only has a bottom tab bar navigation and a second floor. Moreover, the second floor can only be accessed by pulling down on the home page. Its navigation design is simpler and more practical.

In the display of financial products, although both use the diamond grid design style, CCB's method is easier for users to view and choose than ICBC's. CCB has carefully selected entrances such as quick profit, fund investment, and wealth management products, and displayed them in a two-row "7+1 (1 more)" layout, so that users can have a clear view of the financial products and locate the functions they want more conveniently; while ICBC displays 17 entrances, requiring users to swipe left and right to view them all. But ordinary users usually do not slide unless they have a strong motivation.

Mobile banking apps have both mobile Internet attributes and financial attributes. This means that the App must not only take care of the user's experience on the mobile terminal, but also meet the user's needs for financial services in the mobile environment.

For example, the diamond grid area below the search bar is the core functional area of ​​a page, but in the diamond grid area of ​​the smart financial management channel, ICBC actually gave such an important exposure area to niche financial products such as account energy and account agricultural products. This is not conducive to the role of King Kong District in directing high-frequency business.

Source: Mobile Banking User Experience White Paper (First Quarter of 2021)

If mobile banking wants to enhance its competitiveness, it does not need to rely on "surprise victory". According to the "Mobile Banking User Experience White Paper (First Quarter of 2021)", interviewed users said that the most used functions are query details and transfer and remittance functions.

The “Foreign Exchange Settlement and Sale” (corresponding to the “Handling Foreign Exchange Business” in the survey) that was highlighted in the King Kong Grid area of ​​the wealth management channels of the two apps of CCB and ICBC is rarely used by users. Users' pain points are more concentrated on high-frequency functions such as inquiries and transfers. Mobile banking should invest more resources in polishing the granularity of high-frequency functions and user experience.

Unpopular functions can be accurately delivered based on customer group characteristics. For example, on the star-rated benefits page of the ICBC App, a two-star customer can currently see five-star and higher-rated benefits displayed in grayscale (they cannot be used after clicking). Functions like this can be implemented by the front-end calling an interface to query the information of the currently logged-in user and display the available benefits for the current star level in a targeted manner. This can not only prevent non-target users from feeling lost, but also reduce the visual load of the page.

Similarly, mobile banking can use the customer tag system and resource position system to display functions with higher conversion rates to users who match the customer tags, creating a simple experience for users.

Summary: In terms of overall architecture, both mobile banking services have much room for improvement. The navigation design of the CCB App can be made simpler; both apps can be further optimized in terms of function exposure. Some niche functions do not have to be launched in the King Kong area, but can be pushed to customers with potential needs based on customer tags.

3. Interaction Design

(1) Register and log in

Judging from the registration process, overall, the operating cost of the CCB App is lower than that of the ICBC App. During the registration process, the CCB App did not force users to do face recognition, but instead encouraged users to do so by increasing their credit limit. The ICBC App requires users to scan their faces before it can be used normally, and the face scanning process is lengthy.

Facial information storage can be integrated into the facial recognition service authorization form as a requirement to reduce user operations. It would be incredible for users to find it difficult to sign a facial recognition service agreement and have to verify two different passwords in succession.

Compared with its peers, CCB has not yet achieved the separation of registration and card binding. After users register with their mobile phone numbers, they need to immediately do bank card authentication, while ICBC has achieved it. New users can complete registration on the ICBC App by entering their mobile phone number, SMS verification code, and setting a login password.

However, after registration, the ICBC App will pop up strong reminders to bind your card at many function entrances. If you do not bind your card, you will not be able to continue browsing. In comparison, the CCB App allows users to browse a deeper level of pages when not logged in.

Moreover, the interaction of ICBC's strong reminders is rather confusing. The author found at least seven different reminders during the experience. The problems exposed here are: ICBC App did not implement unified interaction specifications during product design. When each function detected that the user had not bound a card, it threw out a failure prompt in its own way. Product personnel did not have an accurate understanding of when to use Toast, Dialog, and Actionbar pop-up windows. Development and testing personnel did not have user thinking and directly used cold language such as "Error code: 96309266" on the front-end page to communicate with users.

Summary: In general, the registration process cost of CCB App is lower than that of ICBC App, and the former's user experience consistency and friendliness are higher than the latter.

(2) Remittance

In terms of functional granularity and detailed experience, ICBC's financial services are slightly inferior to CCB's. Let’s focus on analyzing the most common transfer and remittance used by individual users:

In terms of UI design, CCB's is relatively neater and more beautiful; while ICBC's page gives people a messy feeling, and the distinction between the payment limit button, SMS notification checkbox, change button and other designs is not obvious.

On the transfer page, when the cursor hits the input box for the transfer amount, the CCB App will pull up its self-developed security keyboard, in which users can only enter numerical values. This is simple and emphasizes privacy protection. The ICBC App, on the other hand, will activate the phone's built-in numeric keyboard and occasionally pull up the 26-character pinyin keyboard. If you accidentally enter a symbol other than a numerical value, you will need to click the Next button before it will verify and report an error message.

On the transfer page, the CCB App will prompt the remaining balance in the account. If the transfer amount exceeds the account balance, the fonts of both amounts will turn red, and a prompt will be given saying "Insufficient live balance in the payment account"; however, the ICBC App does not prompt the account balance. Users need to enter the balance blindly and click the Next button before they know the balance is insufficient. Moreover, ICBC's prompts are composed of development language and accounting language such as "Information code: 4102, prompt information: debit account", which is not mapped into daily language that is easy for users to understand.

In comparison, the transfer and remittance business of the CCB App follows more of Nielsen's top ten usability principles, such as "elegant and simple", "appropriate environment", and "error prevention is better than timely error reporting", while the ICBC App does not.

Carefully polishing the user experience is an important strategy for mobile banking to break the homogeneity of financial products. In the increasingly mature competitive landscape of domestic consumer Internet, any financial product that sells well in the market will usually be quickly modularized by competitors. It is basically impossible to maintain core competitiveness by relying on unique product functions. In this context, only by pursuing the ultimate user experience can we enhance the stickiness and activity of App users.

ICBC's technical strength is leading in the industry, but the user experience of its App does not match it. For example, when an error message is given, the phrase "Information code: XXX" is thrown out. It is obvious that the product is designed from a development perspective and user-friendliness is ignored. Whether to establish a user experience responsibility system and how to cultivate development, testing, product and other talents to have a user perspective and be jointly responsible for user experience are all topics that banks need to study.

Summary: Improving user experience is a solution to the problem of homogeneity of financial products. Mobile banking may wish to apply theories such as Nielsen’s Top Ten Usability Principles in Internet product interaction design to guide the optimization of App’s operating experience.

(3) Customer service interaction

In terms of intelligent voice services, the China Construction Bank App can wake up the intelligent assistant Banke by saying "Banke Banke" and have a conversation with it. The limitation is that currently voice wake-up can only be performed on the first-level interface of each channel, and cannot be pulled up on the second-level or deeper pages. The intelligent assistant has good basic conversation and matching capabilities (linking to corresponding function points), and can basically handle most written languages.

In addition, the CCB App integrates smart assistants, frequently asked questions and telephone customer service 95533 at the customer service entrance. The business process of intelligent customer service is: ask question → answer → solved/unsolved. If unsolved, the prompt will be “Consult Xiaowei’s teacher”.

In comparison, the ICBC App requires you to manually click the microphone icon before jumping to the smart voice page. When talking to it, the user needs to long press the microphone button and release it to start recognition. Its voice recognition and function matching capabilities are slightly better than those of the CCB App.

In the upper right corner of each section of the ICBC App, you can find customer service through the "+" button. Common operations are followed by customer service entrances, and you can also call out customer service by shaking your phone. The homepage of the "My Customer Service" function integrates "customer service headlines, common functions, frequently asked questions and customer service entrance", but the four common functions are not reasonable enough - for first-level functions such as "domestic remittances and financial management", the probability of users seeking help from customer service is relatively low.

In my experience, when a message fails to be sent, click the exclamation mark button and ICBC will pop up a dialog window to ask the user to confirm resending. This is a cumbersome design. Resending does not involve any change in funds, but the customer service still requires a second confirmation when resending. Moreover, the "Confirm" button is on the left, which does not conform to the right-hand operation habits of most people. This makes it necessary to be cautious when sending messages to customer service, which is not conducive to appropriate interaction with mobile banking.

Summary: In terms of customer service interaction, ICBC's artificial intelligence technology is stronger than CCB's, but CCB's interaction is smoother and more friendly than ICBC's.

6. User Experience Big Data Comparison

The previous article selected three interactions such as transfer and remittance for key analysis, but the author believes that in terms of user experience comparison, big data analysis has a stronger say than case analysis. Generally speaking, the App with a higher average rating provides a better user experience.

Data from Qimai.com shows that many users have divided the average ratings of China Construction Bank App and Industrial and Commercial Bank App into 3.3 points and 3 points, which is far from the ratings of China Merchants Bank App, the "King of Retail" (4.9 points). Both of these equally divided into the top five in the industry, which is inconsistent with the two state-owned banks ranking first and second in terms of user scale and number of active users.

In order to find something that can be improved, the author once again downloaded user comments from Qimai.com during this period from January 2015 to August 2021, and selected those with ratings of 1-2 points, and used word cloud for visualization.

Visualization of negative reviews of users shows that the update policies of these two mobile banking apps have been criticized by many users, mainly focusing on the updates that are too frequent and forced updates. Banks may require users to update to ensure the security of the software in order to resolve certain bugs in the old version. But mandatory updates undoubtedly hit the user experience. Banks need to reduce forced updates by building high-aggregation and low-coupling systems to enhance their backward compatibility capabilities.

The two user groups have different dissatisfaction with the password function. ICBC users complain more about "endless verification". Every time they use the service, they often need SMS verification code + login password + withdrawal password, and they also need to scan their faces when they involve transfers. However, the users of the China Construction Bank App complain more about forgetting that the password function is incomplete and it is inconvenient to retrieve the password.

In addition, the performance of the ICBC App has greater room for improvement than the China Construction Bank App. There are obviously more negative reviews about the ICBC App "stuttering", "unstudying" and "flashing" than those of the CCB App. During the experience, I even experienced a page that was white-screened for more than five minutes, but it still didn't load. This shows that the bank's operation and maintenance capabilities need to be improved.

Summary: Both CCB and ICBC App need to adopt more friendly update policies, improve password functions, and enhance operation and maintenance capabilities.

VII. Conclusion

1. SWOT analysis

In the above, the author focused on conducting a horizontal comparison and analysis of the China Construction Bank App and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China App from the perspectives of business strategy, product functions, interactive design, etc. The SWOT model is used to summarize the analysis of the full text as follows:

In summary, the leading ranking of these two mobile banking apps in user scale and active users is more attributed to the innate advantages of these two banks as large state-owned commercial banks in credit endorsement, asset scale, social status, etc. But if you look into the dimension of user experience, both apps have a lot of room for improvement.

2. Optimization suggestions

In order to further improve the user experience of mobile banking, this article puts forward some personal suggestions from the product perspective.

Construction Bank can do a good job:

1. Strengthen the positioning of the China Construction Bank App to serve individual C-end customers, and migrate functions such as fast loans on small and micro enterprise platforms, cross-border fast loans-subsidized loans, etc. to the enterprise version of mobile banking;
2. Reduce the investment in new resources in functions, and change from striving for "surprise win" to carefully creating high-frequency functions such as inquiry and transfer;
3. Simplify the navigation bar and delete interactive designs that look good but cannot bring conversions and recommendations.

And ICBC can do:

1. Further strengthen the centralized construction of mobile clients, promote the integration of e-bank and e-connection, and realize the closed loop of the basic financial service chain;
2. Follow the 7±2 rule to optimize the layout of the App function portal, and target niche functions to provide users with a simple operating experience;
3. Drawing on the ten major usability principles of Nelson to focus on guiding and optimizing the user experience of basic functions such as registration, login, transfer and remittance.

Author: Xiao Ming

Source: Xiao Ming