Attracting potential customers by financial institutions and converting them into clients is one of the most difficult processes in the industry. Out of the entire customer journey, this stage is crucial when it comes to future loyalty, as it can maximize the profitability of customers. As traditional banks and insurance companies compete against each, fin-tech companies, such as loan providers, budget management players, currency exchange agencies, payment providers, and insurtech companies are gaining their market share.

But speaking of the customer journey, this is what may annoy users the most:

  • no Save and Resume feature during the customer journey
  • the necessity to fill out plenty of data which is especially painful on a mobile phone
  • lack of possibility to do the whole process online
  • lack of consistency between web and mobile versions
  • poor customer support

The Rise of Mobile Phones

Mobile phones offer more features than their web counterparts. Because of that, young people, especially the generation Z, prefer to use mobile devices. With that said, mobile apps seem to be an efficient tool to ensure a smooth customer onboarding experience with a higher conversion rate and better customer experience.

Unfortunately, developing native mobile applications for iOS and Android along with a website requires more resources and finances to launch and maintain those apps further down the road. As long as large banks can afford it, they usually face another obstacle – the customer needs to download the native app.

The rest of the medium size players in the financial industry simply can’t afford to build native apps because of limited resources. So they won’t invest in them anyway.

Progressive Web Application: What It Is and Why It Matters

Fortunately, with emerging technologies, such as PWA (Progressive Web Application) companies of all sizes and budgets can benefit from an array of advantages equally. So if you really couldn’t afford a native mobile app until now, then progressive web apps are perfect for you.

Basically, we can say that a progressive web app is a website that has features such as speed, performance, responsiveness and works just perfect in mobile devices. Additionally, you don’t have to submit your PWA to the Google Play store or the Appstore.

Just to better explain the idea of PWA apps, one of the best examples is Trivago – the hotel booking app that helps users choose the best hotel stay even when they are offline. Trivago offers a free app for both Android and iOS. It also includes interactive push notifications and an offline mode. Trivago’s PWA with multilanguage support is available in over 55 countries.

In the financial industry, using PWA gives several advantages for both the financial institution and the customer.

Advantages for financial institutions:

  • Lower development and maintenance costs
  • Independence from Google Play and App Store
  • Possibility to send push notifications to customers
  • Easy integration with most device features like push, Biometric authentications, camera, etc.
  • The popularization of PWA among customers (e.g. Uber, Spotify)

Advantages for customers:

  • PWA delivers a native app-like customer experience without installing the app
  • The possibility to create a shortcut on the main screen
  • Offline mode
  • Low device memory and data consumption
  • No need to update the application

The Pros Outweigh the Cons

Despite the fact that there are some disadvantages connected with using PWA, the advantages outweigh them by far. On top of that, Apple has opened to the idea of PWA and many issues have already been solved during the last months.  

Conclusions

Although PWA is already mature, its popularity as an application leaves a lot to wish for in the financial sector. However, because of the advantages that it gives to both app providers and the end users, PWA seems to be an attractive alternative for dynamic non banking financial institutions. And this may further enforce bigger players to open to PWA.