The size Fifth Third will gain through buying Comerica offers a well-timed spotlight on the Cincinnati lender’s efforts to sharpen its mobile banking features, an executive said this week.
The bank has been working on a handful of enhancements to its app around financial wellness and making tasks easier for customers, said Erin Crawford, Fifth Third’s head of consumer digital – payments and money management. Updates are expected to be rolled out in the coming months.
At the Money20/20 conference in Las Vegas, Crawford said Fifth Third aimed to “reset the narrative” around banks and innovation.
“I think people see a financial institution and think that we’re slow and that we don’t have technology, or that we’re last to market,” Crawford said in an interview Sunday at the conference.
Changes to the bank’s app include dropping a “Goals” section in favor of a new financial hub called “Plan.” The former “was taking up a lot of real estate in the app,” and “we felt like we could revamp the vision of where we were going,” Crawford said.
“Plan” will include a visualization of recurring spending, including a customer’s bills, and offer insights and actions such as allowing customers to cancel or maintain subscriptions, she said.
Bank customers can also keep tabs on cash flow management, seeing their spending or their income for the last three or six months.
Crawford said the shift reflects the bank’s effort to move away from the “dated” term “personal financial management,” in favor of packaging “overall, holistic financial wellness solutions.”
Changes will be made for customers with a certain Fifth Third savings account before ideally being rolled out for all demand deposit account and credit card customers, she said.
The launch of a new mobile app in 2022 has enabled faster releases of new functions. The bank works with fintechs such as Atomic, but “even if we're partnering with someone on the back end, we leverage [application programming interfaces] to control the experience,” Crawford said.
In 2018, the bank bought the fintech Dobot, whose capabilities were integrated into Fifth Third’s app as the “Goals” function.
“Then we sort of said, ‘Well, where else could we go?’” Crawford said.
Fifth Third sought to zero in on “customers ‘jobs to be done,’” including checking balances, putting money in an account or making payments, tracking and managing a budget.
“We've put a microscope around each kind of ‘job to be done’ very tightly,” she said.
The $212.9 billion-asset bank takes an “intentionally unsexy” approach to mobile app improvements, Ben Hoffman, chief strategy officer and head of consumer products, told Banking Dive this year.
“We focus on quality where it matters, with the core theory being that, for the most part, our customers want banking to fade into the background,” he said.
Within SmartShield – a security tool introduced in the bank’s app last year that “gamifies” digital safety – Fifth Third is launching a “fraud center” this year or early next, Crawford said.
There, customers can upload suspicious texts or emails, like a text purportedly from the bank they might be unsure about, and the bank’s fraud team will analyze it and confirm whether or not it’s fraudulent.
Fifth Third typically gets calls about concerning texts that are passed to the fraud department, so “instead of going through that chain, we've streamlined the process quite a bit,” internally and externally, she said.
The bank is also focused on making customers aware of different types of payment options and presenting those in a straightforward way so they can choose based on their needs, Crawford said.
With Fifth Third’s proposed acquisition of Comerica, the lender anticipates more customers will use its digital tools – which offer capabilities Comerica doesn’t – and provide feedback on them.
“Some of the capabilities that will help in the acquisition are things that we have today, like direct deposit switch,” she said. Payment switching – allowing a customer to swap a card on file for bills – is another feature that’s coming soon, Crawford said.
Additionally, the bank is using Jeanie, its virtual banking assistant, to enhance its search function. That’s an area “where we're putting a lot of time and focus on how can [artificial intelligence] streamline those experiences, figure out those intents, make them faster for the customer, and then obviously go back to that job to be done,” she said.
It’s also an enhancement that may aid the integration process with Comerica customers, helping them find things more easily in the app, Crawford noted.
And with the growth spurt the bank is set to go through in acquiring $78.3 billion-asset Comerica, elevating Fifth Third into top-10 bank territory, “I think people will start to recognize us for those good things,” she added.
