Posts tagged Financial Services

Report finds mobile apps by banks are confusing to users

A recent study shows that banks still have work to do on their mobile applications.

Personally, I’m very happy with the online and mobile version from my bank, USAA.

Wells Fargo ATMs take “interactive” a step further

We’ve all done it – interacted with a machine on a street corner in order to gain access to some physical currency.  Everyone knows the process:

  • Select your language (I personally select randomly to mix it up a little)
  • Enter PIN (glance over your shoulder to make sure your friend isn’t peeking)
  • Select transaction type
  • Select account
  • Indicate amount (grumble about the increments and/or limits)
  • Agree to fee (does anyone stop at this point?)
  • The machine wishes you a happy birthday
  • Your cash is provided below

Yes, I know, most of us don’t expect our ATM machine to wish us a happy birthday, let alone break the standard protocol that we’ve all become accustomed to over the years. But this seems to be the case with Wells Fargo ATMs, as a friend pointed out to me recently. I thought this was pretty cool and so did he – enough to tell me and most likely a dozen other people about it.

So I poked around to see what else Wells Fargo is doing across other interactive platforms and found the start of a well executed Twitter communication strategy. It seems, for whatever reason, that Wells Fargo had the internal foresight to grab their @WellsFargo account as early as April 2007, but have yet to tweet more than 5 times since April 2007. The bio on that account states“We’re holding our name for now, but hope to participate soon”.

On the other hand, Wells Fargo has another Twitter account, @ask_WellsFargo, with 6 Wells Fargo employees taking turns at the helm. The six are using short signatures on their tweets to indicate who is tweeting. (i.e. ^SS)

I’ve helped implement what seems to be simple social/interactive elements like this into companies big and small – so I can only imagine the amount of politics and coordination that went into both examples of Wells Fargo embracing technology and social trends to create a bond with their customers. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on them, although it would take much more than that to get me to switch banks from USAA. (big fan)