Mobile nudging: Youth engagement with banking apps

Mobile-banking (m-banking) is of particular interest to banks seeking to sustain their market share because of m-banking’s role attracting and retaining customers, especially young ones. This article reports on a study that applies concepts from behavioural economics (BE) and ‘nudging’ with the objective of promoting young people’s ongoing engagement with m-banking applications (that is, software designed to run on mobile devices, or m-banking ‘apps’ in common parlance). Insights and ideas for new features or refinements for m-banking apps were generated from discussions with a large class of senior marketing students, and then presented to m-banking managers and app designers to refine and to select two features for each of five constructs from BE: loss aversion, power of now, scarcity value, chunking and choice architecture. The relative desirability of these 10 m-banking features was investigated via a survey involving a pairwise-ranking exercise that was completed by 257 young m-banking consumers. Overall, the research reveals that m-banking app design can benefit from fundamentally different approaches (relative to traditional methodologies) that prioritise intuitive interfaces over non-intuitive-based designs, and, in particular, that BE and nudging can supply valuable insights and ideas for new features or refinements.