Rabobank is an online bank, so they do business online, over the phone and by mail. Without the overheads and high operational costs of other banks, RaboDirect Banking is able to pass considerable savings on to its customers, allowing them to save with no fees, no minimums and some of the best rates in any country. As an online only bank, Rabobank IDB is continuously looking for new ways to digitalize their services towards their clients. Besides the online banking solution, the mobile app was an important part of their digital strategy. The mobile app should express stability and security to provide a comforting experience for their customers. Rabobank IDB strives for transparent savings products and wants to offer uncomplicated savings products that clients can use according to their individual wishes and needs. Our online banking solution was already built in Mendix. Rabobank IDB expressed their desire to develop and maintain the applications with a small DevOps team. Therefore it made sense to use the Mendix platform to develop the mobile app on top of the same middle ware.
Business Need: Rabobank is an online bank, so they do business online, over the phone and by mail. Without the overheads and high operational costs of other banks, RaboDirect Banking is able to pass considerable savings on to its customers, allowing them to save with no fees, no minimums and some of the best rates in any country. As an online only bank, Rabobank IDB is continuously looking for new ways to digitalize their services towards their clients. Besides the online banking solution, the mobile app was an important part of their digital strategy. The mobile app should express stability and security to provide a comforting experience for their customers. Rabobank IDB strives for transparent savings products and wants to offer uncomplicated savings products that clients can use according to their individual wishes and needs. Our online banking solution was already built in Mendix. Rabobank IDB expressed their desire to develop and maintain the applications with a small DevOps team. Therefore it made sense to use the Mendix platform to develop the mobile app on top of the same middle ware.
Solution: Together with Rabobank and Mendix we launched the mobile banking app next to their web portal. The mobile banking app allows customers of Rabobank IDB to do banking in a mobile optimized way. It has features like signing transactions using fingerprint or face recognition, faster login experience using a PIN code instead of a hardware token and allowing customers to customize their bank account. Delivering the mobile app was a great opportunity to optimize the user experience for existing banking features and set a basis for delivering new functionalities in the future. We had to implement a security framework (Transmit) using a mobile SDK that had to bridged. Other SDKs that where implement are Piwik and Microsoft App Center. All data for customers are coming from their middle ware layer that is built on top of the core banking system Rabobank is using. The mobile app integrates with that via the online runtime. Because of security requirements, the mobile stores almost no data. What can users do now? Access their banking data via a mobile app. The mobile app also brings features like login and transaction signing with pin code or biometrics (without the use of a hardware Digipass), personalized accounts and smart insights. These features are not yet present in the web portal. Easy use with PIN or biometrics. Currently a hardware Digipass is required to login and sign transactions. With the mobile app, customers can use a mobile PIN code or biometrics to login and sign transactions up to 2,500 euro. The Digipass is only needed for binding the device and signing high amount transactions. Synchronous all-round communication. Write, receive and send messages using the mobile app. Customers can access their communication history with the bank at any time so they do not miss anything. Personalized accounts. Customers can upload or select an image from the Rabobank gallery to personalize their accounts. With the ability to assign a name to their account, saving money is more personal.
Results: Feedback from customers are very positive. The mobile app is rated with 4.8 and 4.4 stars in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.Paul Kammerer, Head of Strategy & Business Development Int. Direct Banking: "What we have done as IDB, we have updated our core banking system nearly three years ago to a newer system in order to become flexible, in order to become more modular, and also to become faster because at the end. Only with a more updated core banking system. You can then also start to develop in a certain kind of way, in the agile way. Then also use, for example, services or software like local platform from Mendix which was a pre-requisite for us to be able to do that." henever a client is saying, "Okay, I would like to have this, this and that and this is the reason why I'm not giving you a five star rating but maybe a four star rating." We are trying to take it up in a kind of very, very fast way and develop it. And what we saw in the mobile app, from a mobile app perspective, at least, we have been able to save some of that elements that customers were requesting from us in a super fast way. So at the end, this kind of structural framework that we created was giving us the possibility to create value to clients in a fast way. And this is actually also the reason that I mentioned at the beginning why we decided for Low-code, and which I think from a strategic perspective is really, really crucial for us to focus on in order to be able to make a difference in the market and to compete with the various peers that we are seeing not only FinTechs, but also digital giants."