The team at UK’s investment platform easyMoney notes that the use of Fintech apps is increasing steadily across the globe. That’s why they decided to also launch their own app for their customers.
The company wrote in a blog post that half of easyMoney investors may access their accounts via a mobile device and now the platform has launched a free app, “as part of its wider plan to make the service as user-friendly as possible.”
Using a mobile phone or device to access financial services is “relatively new but since the start of the coronavirus pandemic its use has rocketed,” the team at easyMoney noted.
They pointed out that a third of us use mobile banking apps “at least once a week and 19% of UK adults use one daily, according to a YouGov poll.”
As millions of us were unable to access bank branches due to COVID-related lockdowns, this led to a significant rise in mobile use, “of all kinds of financial apps.”
easyMoney also mentioned that this “led to a surge in investment of fintech apps and the number of apps available, for everything from checking a current account to keeping an eye on how your investments are performing.”
At the start of the Coronavirus outbreak, there was a 72% rise in the use of financial apps in Europe, “at a time when many sectors were struggling.”
Although we weren’t able to see people in person and do the things we were used to, technology “stepped in allowing us to carry on our lives with the help of the internet.” From Zoom calls to online shopping, the internet was used “by most of us at a time when we couldn’t leave our homes and interact with people in person.”
easyMoney also noted that two years on, many of us are still “working from home and have carried on using the methods of working – and living – we adopted during lockdowns.”
As mentioned in the update, technology has “clearly changed the way we use many traditional services, and the past two years has helped to speed up the adoption due to the changing nature of how we are living and working.”
Analysis of easyMoney investors “revealed that half were accessing the website from a mobile device, and therefore creating a mobile app was the obvious option for making this process easier and simpler for users.”
Many users also “check their account balance a number of times a day, therefore creating an app would give them one place to quickly view their balance and all of their account information in one place.”
The free easyMoney app was “launched at the start of 2022 and it’s available on both Apple and Android devices,” the update confirmed. It was created as “a direct response to what investors in the peer-to-peer platform were asking for, a user-friendly way to access their investments.”
Jamie Learmonth, CTO at easyMoney, remarked:
“It’s been on the roadmap, pretty much from day one and it became a priority internally once the demand became apparent. We wanted to first get people using our service on the web and then we started to see how many of those people were actually visiting the website on their mobile. We took that user feedback and used that to develop a much simpler mobile experience through the app.”
The app is just one step in “making the platform as easy as possible for users to access.” During the design process, the aim was to “bring at least 80% of the website’s functionality to the app and to make it as intuitive as possible,” the announcement explained.
The pandemic has “clearly fueled the recent rise in fintech apps but the introduction of Open Banking has also been a major factor.”
It allows financial providers to “access users’ banking and financial data – if they are allowed by the user – and it was introduced under the Payment Services Regulations 2017 which brought the second EU Payment Services Directive (PSD2) into law,” the update explained.
Thanks to the integration of Open Banking, users can easily “view their account details and invest and withdraw funds via the app,” the announcement added.
It’s also a place for new customers “accessing the platform for the first time to sign up.”
Learmonth, who has been with the platform since its inception in 2017, shared:
“In general, the fintech and finance space have moved more and more towards mobile, where traditionally you might have said that people prefer to handle their financial affairs on a computer. But now, people expect your service to be very easy to use via a modern mobile app to even remain relevant. We’ve spoken to some younger investors who actually choose their providers based on the quality of their mobile apps.”