Staying up-to-date with the digital banking industry by finding out what your competitors are up to, is an essential part of the marketing process.

This goal is often achieved through effective digital banking market research. So what happens when you are presented with the opportunity to conduct a competitive analysis? Do you find that you have to open multiple banking accounts to see what your competitors are doing and what they have to offer? This might seem like a good idea at first, but soon after might prove to be the least efficient use of your time and resources.

What if there is a more convenient way to analyze your competitors' offerings without all the hassle, and without that slimy feeling of being an impostor? All for the sake of gathering information. What if there is a way to carry out all of your analysis and research all in one place? The following will be a deeper dive into how to achieve the best possible outcome when it comes to this crucial marketing strategy.

Conducting an effective competitor research comes with many benefits which include:

• Gaining a better understanding of your clients’ expectations and frustrations.
• Helps to properly calibrate and adjust your unique selling proposition (USP). In other words, what makes your offer stand out from the rest in the market.
• It gives you proper predictions of market trends by becoming more aware of consumer behavior.
• Gives more insights to what your competitors are doing right and where they fall short. This information helps to determine what to add or remove from your product offerings to meet the needs of your clients.
  
  

What are some of the challenges of competitive analysis?

Even with its many benefits, conducting proper digital banking research does have its challenges.The following are some of the issues a digital banking research team might be facing while conducting a competitive analysis:

1. Account limit: One of the major challenges you’ll face when performing a banking ux research is the inability to have many accounts opened to gather more insight. You’ll find that when using this approach, you’ll run the risk of having your accounts closed as banks are typically on high alert for any suspicious activity. If this should ever occur, restoring those accounts or setting up new accounts all over again could end up being a complete time waster altogether.
2. Unable to share with teams: During your digital banking market research you might run into some issues with sharing the opened accounts around to a third-party of interest. This is often the case as some platforms or apps are not generally designed for resharing purposes. Thus making it very challenging to share with the banking ux team for further analysis.
3. Inadequate monitoring: Your team might believe they have a good grasp of what is going on in the market. But will come to find out that they are in a bubble when it comes to realistically monitoring the market from their limited vantage point on those banking platforms. Nowadays, there are new features  that are getting released twice as often from institutions in many other regions outside of their focal view.
4. Time consuming: When conducting the digital banking market research, the team could also come to find that it takes a lengthy amount of time to accurately locate what their competitors offer and what they don’t. Because it would require a thorough search throughout the entire application in order to find a specific feature of interest during the research process.
5. Lack of structure: There is no structured way available to see how any specific feature of interest in the research is applied across all of the platforms of their competitors.
6. Geographical limitations: Another problem that could potentially  arise is how limited your digital banking research team is in terms of geographical radius. With a lot of innovation and best-in-class advancements happening worldwide. Lack of access to other bank accounts located in other regions will greatly impact digital banking research findings.
7. High fees: Another problem often encountered is the significantly high rates you will have to pay in order to maintain multiple accounts. And so, if you intend on keeping these accounts maintained to avoid the risk of closure, you inevitably are required to pay up on those high fees. And a lack of payment could run the risk of a damaged credit score in the process.
8. Lack of knowledge with competitor updates: There is also a risk of falling behind when keeping up with competitors' new offerings. It is important to remember that your competitors are also constantly changing their offerings as well to stay on trend with the market as a result of their findings from using their own competitive research tools. (Because just like you, they are also scoping the markets just as fiercely as you are too!)

How FinTech Insights can help your research  team carry out banking UX research

There are many challenges banking ux teams face on the regular — and the list seems to only grow longer. This is why, in collaboration with a team of analysts, and several development teams around the world, FinTech Insights was created. Fintech Insights is a best-in-class, digital banking platform that takes off the heavy weight of analyzing all your competitors’ offerings from bank accounts worldwide — all in one place.

FinTech Insights takes all of your competitors’ digital banking profiles, analyzes each app feature, and documents the findings. With this technology, it’ll allow you to take a comprehensive look behind the scenes of several hundreds of banks — both traditional and challenger banks — by showing the step-by-step look at what it’s like to be their customer. By doing so, you’ll get to identify their strengths and weaknesses to make the necessary adjustments, in order to give your own banking customers a much preferred digital banking experience based on your findings.

FinTech Insights is able to accomplish this task primarily by:

• Mapping out the “user journey”: With this user experience analysis known as the user journey, FinTech Insights maps these steps out  in a flowchart where you can have visual depiction of what a specific bank’s digital platform comprises. 

• Implementing the Perfect 1000 system: With this system, FinTech Insights is able to evaluate the user-friendliness — or lack thereof, of the banking customers’ experience on each bank’s platform. The Perfect 1000 system is a scoring system that measures the effort of a user journey and compares it across several fintech and banks as needed for the competitive research.

Summary

Conducting a competitive analysis is a crucial step in the digital banking research process, but it is not quite the easiest task to do. In order to maximize your product offerings, your digital banking ux team needs to take advantage of the best competitive research tools. FinTech Insights delivers thorough analysis of banks and fintechs worldwide, including the USA, Europe, UK, Latin America and Asia Pacific.

 Learn more about the FinTech Insights platform today by requesting a  demo.