Mobile-banking apps have evolved well beyond basic functionalities. Customers are no longer limited to viewing account balances or paying bills. Instead, leading banks are now engineering mobile-first experiences that support increasingly sophisticated customer interactions—including instantly issuing virtual cards, providing seamless access to multicurrency accounts, and offering intelligent personal finance tools, such as contextual goal setting, digital financial advice, and one-click investment journeys. Banks are also extending their mobile ecosystems to include lifestyle-enhancing loyalty programs, often integrating services beyond traditional banking.
Mobile apps have become the primary gateway to the full spectrum of retail banking. The front-runners are now using their mobile app as a central hub for orchestrating and managing every customer interaction, regardless of complexity.[1]
The result? Mobile apps are no longer just a convenience—they are the strategic hub of customer engagement.
Consumers are responding with enthusiasm. Banks that lead in mobile innovation are seeing significantly higher engagement, more-frequent customer interactions, and markedly stronger commercial outcomes. Benchmarks by Finalta, a McKinsey company, indicate that mobile-banking leaders resolve more than 80 percent of routine interactions entirely in the app by simplifying and streamlining user journeys. These institutions now generate 51 percent more annual touchpoints and about double the mobile-driven sales and new customer acquisitions than the global average (exhibit).
Notably, this shift is global. The performance gap between leaders and laggards exceeds regional differences. While top banks see 2.3 times more interactions than laggards, the largest variance across regions is just 1.7 times, highlighting that success hinges more on execution than geography.
So what does it take to become a mobile-banking leader?
McKinsey experience suggests that, as a starting point, mobile leaders get the basics right. They delight their customers with seamless and simple “first time right” service propositions in the app, which in turn builds trust for other, more-commercial interactions, making the app the primary channel for customer interactions. From there, mobile leaders excel at four capabilities to provide an unparalleled customer experience across the most complex journeys:
1. Embedding a seamless design to promote positive user experience
Over time, many banks’ apps have become overly complex and hard to navigate. This serves as a deterrent for customers, most of whom are willing to engage with only a limited number of layers and screens. In contrast, new fintech disruptors are starting with a blank slate and provide a simple, design-oriented experience. They might focus on streamlining payment journeys, providing easy access to banking partnerships and beyond-banking services, or making it easy to search for and navigate to product offers. Whatever they do, they get the basic customer experience right through thoughtful design.
For incumbents, simplifying the design of years-old apps is far from easy. It requires a pragmatic focus, which is often delayed by decision-making inertia. Data, technology, and business teams must collaborate to rebuild the channel—updating the front end and APIs and overhauling the back end. Banks can decide whether to launch a full redesign at once or roll out progressive, frequent updates.
2. Leading with hyper-personalization
A hyper-personalized, data-driven approach—putting customer behavior and business intelligence at the center—is essential for a differentiated user experience. The app must provide customers with a personalized, targeted, and resolution-driven experience. Leading banks that take this approach foster deeper customer loyalty while minimizing attrition across channels. Examples of this include seamlessly consolidating a customer’s credit products to reduce fees; offering smarter, proactive budgeting tools; identifying cost-effective alternatives for utilities; and providing tips for boosting a customer’s credit score—all without the customer having to lift a finger. This is possible through in-app, gen AI–enabled conversations.
3. Building a predictive engagement layer
With the rise of gen AI agents, banks can now integrate predictive reasoning capabilities directly into their apps via in-app conversational banking, elevating customer experience and achieving faster service resolution. For example, many apps offer humanlike conversation with a gen AI–enabled chatbot. If the chatbot understands the customer’s intent, it can execute the transaction directly or direct the customer to the appropriate customer journey. If the gen AI chatbot can’t take the conversation any further, it can intelligently connect the customer with the right human agent without the customer even knowing they’ve been handed off.
Mobile leaders are taking this even further by equipping their human chat agents with gen AI copilots. These copilots can rapidly draft responses for agents to review that incorporate relevant bank policies and regulations, saving agents time and effort that otherwise would have been spent on locating this information. Meanwhile, customers get fast, accurate answers without having to make a phone call. Many are now able to resolve their issues end to end within the app.
An emerging frontier is voice-based interaction with gen AI agents. Instead of relying solely on chat, customers will increasingly engage with AI through natural spoken conversations. In fact, leading global banks are already beginning to experiment with text and voice interactions with AI agents while maintaining human oversight to ensure governance, compliance, and accountability in the final steps of the customer journey.
4. Intelligently routing customers to other channels
Leading banks position their app as the central hub for customer interactions, resolving more than 80 percent of routine banking interactions directly within the app. For the remaining 20 percent, the goal is first-time-right deflection to another channel: If customers must be directed to an alternative channel of the bank, the app intelligently guides them to the right one based on their profile, needs, and past preferences, avoiding a situation in which the customer is passed back and forth between channels.
Achieving seamless, intelligent routing across channels requires hyper-personalization via a “smart data brain,” which comprises two main capabilities:
- anticipating customer needs with an integrated view of data and an understanding of disruptions in the customer journey
- enabling proactive, personalized outreach through targeted push notifications and digital interventions at critical moments—most important, handing customers off to the right next channels before they end their digital journey
For example, if a customer suddenly halts their search for the best travel credit card in the app and logs in three days later to pay a bill, an intelligent routing engine would trigger a push notification reminding them of the credit card search, enhanced with an offer such as “double the spend points.” It would then offer the customer a live chat with an agent to learn more, providing a timely helping hand before the customer exits the app.
McKinsey analysis suggests that with gen AI enablement and advanced modeling, banks can predict customer needs with roughly 90 percent accuracy.[2] Banks must embrace a bold approach—routing customers proactively to the most appropriate channel—to create active advocates of the app and bank, thereby deepening customer engagement.
These four capabilities can position a mobile-banking app as the market leader. But banks don’t have to do it all at once. Banks can prioritize for specific goals. If the goal is to position the app as a sales engine, banks should prioritize hyper-personalization and seamless user design experience. The simpler and easier to navigate these experiences are, the higher the in-app sales conversion. If the app is positioned as a first-time-right resolution service engine, banks could prioritize predictive-engagement capability for first-time resolution and customer support with intelligent routing from the app to other channels.
The difference between mobile leaders and laggards is stark. Incumbents are striving to protect and strategically expand their customer base, and the need for a distinctive mobile-banking app has never been more critical. If banks don’t move swiftly to improve their mobile apps, they’ll continue to fall further behind their peers.
The mobile-banking opportunity is big. Are you playing to win?
[1] Integrated channels: The next frontier beyond omnichannel distribution,” McKinsey, May 4, 2023.
[2] McKinsey growth alpha estimates of predictive accuracy of customer behaviors over two years.
David Tan is a partner in McKinsey’s London office, where Annie Hillier and Neha Kabra are associate partners. José Capel is a partner in the Berlin office, Max Flötotto is a senior partner in the Munich office, and Muthanna Muslet is a partner in the Dubai office.
Copyright © 2025 McKinsey & Company. All rights reserved.