U.S. Bank tops mobile banking surveys for second year in a row

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  • Key Insight: U.S. Bank's mobile banking strategy is focused on driving in-app engagement.
  • What's at Stake: Banks risk losing customers if mobile apps fail to give customers high-value features.
  • Expert Quote: Emmett Higdon says home-screen placement determines feature visibility and user adoption.
    Bullets generated by AI with editorial review.

U.S. Bank has maintained its place at the top of two industry rankings for mobile banking.
The bank ranked first in mobile banking on two industry scorecards: one produced by Keynova Group, the other by Javelin Strategy & Research. Both reports also placed Bank of America in second place.

U.S. Bank pulled similar rankings from both firms in 2024, and the bank has continued to emphasize its mobile banking strategy over the past year.

"Clients expect their digital experiences to be more than merely transactional," Ankit Bhatt, chief digital officer for consumers, small business and platforms at U.S. Bank, told American Banker. "They need to be anticipatory and individualized. That means using the data and interactions we have with our clients to make our experiences more rich, more useful, and more informative for them. This is something clients expect from us, shaped by their experiences with other mobile apps they use, and they carry those expectations into banking as well."

The Keynova Mobile Banker Scorecard started in 2011, and U.S. Bank has ranked the top overall bank in nine consecutive Mobile Banker Scorecards since 2021. (Keynova issues the Mobile Banker Scorecard twice per year).

One key feature of mobile banking, according to the full Keynova report, is not yet standard across the industry: real-time alerts on account balances. While 82% of banks surveyed by Keynova offer real-time low-balance alerts, only 53% provide immediate notifications for negative or overdraft balances.

U.S. Bank has offered real-time balance alerts since 2019, according to the company, and includes action items such as transferring funds when a customer is sent a push notification for an overdraft.

U.S. Bank was ranked by Javelin as best in class for mobile banking for the second year in a row in the firm's 2025 Mobile Banking Report. Emmett Higdon, director of digital banking for Javelin, said U.S. Bank kept its top spot by upgrading its Security Center, being an early pioneer in account aggregation for open banking, and focusing on adding enhancements to the app without dramatically changing existing app navigation and displays.

"We're very much about how features are being delivered, and that's really what has put U.S. Bank at the top of the charts over some of their peers," Higdon told American Banker. "They do a much better job integrating all the functionality that they offer and putting it right in front of the customer."

Higdon emphasized the importance of a bank mobile app's home screen for effectively presenting features to users.

"Your mobile banking home screen is the single most expensive piece of real estate that you have," he said. "It's also the most effective. A bank may have a thousand features that are really interesting to help me manage my money better, manage my budgets, manage my cash flow. But if they're four clicks down, chances are I never am going to see them and may not even know they're there."

Budgeting tools and spending insights is one example of a feature that banks, including U.S. Bank, have been struggling to effectively incorporate into their mobile platforms. In a 2024 Consumer Reports survey of ten mobile banking apps, U.S. Bank lost marks in the organization's rubric by not having budgeting tools readily available to all customers on its mobile app. Instead, the bank offers tools specifically when rules are triggered such as a low account balance or an overdraft fee.

In response to a request for comment, a U.S. Bank representative told American Banker that the bank has budgeting tools that can include both U.S. Bank accounts and external aggregated accounts, and it delivers notifications if customers go over preestablished category budgets. The bank also stated that it has redesigned its checking account experience to better surface monthly spending trends. Spending indicators, a separate category from budgeting tools in the survey, was previously acknowledged as a strong suit for U.S. Bank by Consumer Reports.

"We consistently push banks on this," Higdon said. "This spending insight may be well done, U.S. Bank, Bank of America. But nobody's seeing this. I may never drill down that far into my checking account. There's so many other links and footnotes and other stuff that I don't ever scroll that far. The visibility of those features is something that can be done much better by banks overall."

Consumer Reports also highlighted the issue of overall lack of consumer usage of bank budgeting tools. The organization's 2023 Banking Apps Survey found that only 13% of surveyed American banking app users have taken advantage of features that help them set up savings goals, 18% have used budgeting tools and 16% have used round-up savings offers.

Overall, however, mobile banking as a whole has become increasingly important for banks.

"Customers have voted with their fingertips," Higdon said. "We see mobile banking moving beyond online banking. It has higher numbers for overall adoption and number of touches. I go into online banking a couple times a month because I've got a bunch of bills to pay or I need to look at the charts in a much bigger way, but with mobile banking you might be in and out of your account three, four or five times a day, every day. Increasingly, the primary touch point for customers is their mobile banking app. Not only do banks need to make it easy to manage accounts, check transactions, make sure nobody's taken over an account, and so on, but that's how I [as a bank] am going to sell you [as the customer] your next account."

In the past year 67,000 families have also started using family finance product Greenlight through the bank's mobile app as of June 2025, according to U.S. bank. The bank declined to comment on how the Greenlight partnership, announced in June 2024, has impacted mobile app usage among users, but did say that new connectivity features for U.S. Bank Greenlight users are expected to be rolled out later this year.

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