- 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
U.S. Bank pulled similar rankings from both firms
"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
"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
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
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."
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