Mobile banking experiences: Trends and best practices for 2025 (and beyond)

Mobile has overtaken every other banking channel. And it’s done it fast.

For product managers and UX teams in financial services, the pressure is on. You’re expected to deliver fast, secure, user-friendly experiences across every screen.

So, how are the best teams keeping up? Read on to find out.

In 2024, the global mobile banking market hit $9.63 billion, and it’s expected to more than double by 2032—growing at a CAGR of 11.7%. What started as a nice-to-have in online banking is now the primary interface connecting customers and their finances.

That means your mobile banking experience is your brand. And if it’s slow, clunky, or confusing, customers will switch and move on.

To keep users loyal and engaged, you need to optimize your mobile banking experience. How? By actioning research-fuelled insights.

Our 2025 Future of User Research Report shows just how critical experience design has become:

✅ 87% of Product teams now use user research to inform decisions, not just for usability testing, but for guiding strategy.
✅Teams that embed research early report 2.7x better outcomes, including higher usability, customer satisfaction, and retention.

Users want fast, personalized, and seamless digital experiences. When they don’t get them, your competitors are waiting to help them switch.
Here are the biggest trends shaping mobile banking UX in 2025.

Whether it’s checking a balance at 2am, sending money while commuting, or resolving a failed payment on the weekend, users expect 24/7 access—no downtime, no delays, no exceptions.

According to McKinsey’s State of Retail Banking report, mobile banking touchpoints per customer increased by 72% over three years, surpassing even leading e-commerce platforms in engagement.

Mobile banking is the primary way people interact with their finances.

For Product teams, this means designing mobile banking UX as a real-time system. The back end must be resilient. Status updates must be immediate. Support must be built in. If your app can’t deliver during high-stakes moments, users notice—and they churn.

For a growing number of customers, banking no longer starts at their local branch—it starts on their smartphone. From opening accounts to applying for loans or checking in money, users now expect to complete every interaction digitally, without needing to visit a physical location.

According to our Customer Experience Banking Trends research, 37% of customers use digital platforms to reduce their reliance on branches, while 23% still prefer in-person service for certain transactions. But here’s the catch: 59% of users rate their mobile banking experience as “average.” That’s an experience gap and a warning sign.

Meeting those expectations means rethinking mobile UX as the primary experience layer—complete, intuitive, and real-time.

Take Itaú Unibanco, one of the largest banks in Latin America. With hundreds of digital products and millions of users, the team faced a massive challenge: scale usability testing without sacrificing quality.

They used Maze to replace slow, resource-heavy interviews with high-volume, unmoderated testing, cutting time to insight by 75% and growing their annual test count to 500+ studies. Today, over 300 designers and researchers at Itaú use Maze to ensure every digital experience meets a high bar before it ships.

Managing money isn’t always easy, and customers are looking to their banking apps for more than just transactions. Increasingly, they want tools that help them understand where their money goes, support in planning ahead, and information on how to make confident financial decisions.

These are financial wellness tools—features that help users save, budget, track spending, and stay on top of bills, by:

But not every tool works like it should—an existing tool doesn’t make a helpful tool. If a budgeting feature is buried deep in the app, requires too many steps, or shows numbers that don’t make sense to the user, it won’t get used. If a savings tracker doesn’t reflect how people manage money, they’ll ignore it.

That’s why continuous research is essential. Dig into real user experiences and discover whether yours users actually use the features available, or what new features they’d like. Teams who focus on understanding their users’ needs and behavior will be faster, more focused, and better at building mobile banking experiences people use.

A few years ago, personalized experiences in mobile banking meant a ‘Hi, Alex’ in your inbox. In 2025, it means your app knows when your rent’s due, reminds you when your subscriptions overlap, and suggests better ways to save—before you even ask.

This is the impact of AI. 70% of financial services executives say AI will directly drive revenue growth, not just improve operations. That shift is happening because AI is powering something users now expect by default: experiences that are personal, dynamic, and useful in real time.

Let’s break down what that looks like in practice:

Knowing what to personalize and how to do it starts with high-quality customer insights. Embark on getting customer feedback to understand what’s working and what isn’t—before it ends up underused in a corner of your interface.

So what does a best-in-class mobile banking UX look like in practice?

Let’s get into the tactics.

If users can’t complete a task quickly, they won’t complete it at all.

Simplicity is non-negotiable in mobile banking. That means fewer steps to transfer funds, clearer labels on buttons, and frictionless paths to essential actions, such as checking balances, paying bills, or freezing cards. The goal isn’t just ease—it’s confidence.

Usability testing in financial services is key here. You can’t simplify what you haven’t seen people struggle with.

This is especially important across demographics. Some users are power users. Others just want to log in and know where things stand. Designing with both in mind means stripping back unnecessary complexity, chunking flows into manageable steps, and testing relentlessly.

Customers want to know their money is safe. But they also expect fast, seamless access to their accounts.

That’s why the most effective security today is quiet, reliable, and user-friendly. Biometric authentication, two-factor prompts, and instant fraud alerts are now standard—but how they’re implemented makes all the difference.

If a user has to enter a 12-character password and a rotating code just to check their balance, that’s not secure banking UX—it’s infuriating UX.

The key is designing security that feels like part of the flow. That includes things like:

Balancing trust and ease is a core part of improving customer experience in financial services. And with threats evolving constantly, teams must continuously test how users respond to new patterns, messaging, and alerts.

A customer might start on your app, switch to desktop, and finish with a support call. The journey isn’t linear—but their experience should be. Consistency across channels is critical in banking.

That means:

Strong customer experience strategies treat omnichannel design as a system, not a set of parallel products. That includes shared design systems, cross-platform testing, and user journeys that don’t assume a single screen or path.

It also means looking beyond the UI to test how users actually move through these channels—multichannel and omnichannel testing help teams uncover where continuity breaks and where users drop off.

A truly great banking app works for everyone.

Accessibility is about building inclusive experiences that serve all users. An inclusive experience features accessible visual, motor, cognitive, and auditory elements that are built into your UX.

In practice, this looks like:

Designing for accessibility often improves the experience for everyone. What’s helpful for a user with low vision might also benefit someone managing finances on a shaky subway ride. Accessibility should be part of your UX design process from day one, not something tested last.

As mobile banking features grow more advanced, so does the need for in-app education. That includes onboarding for new features, contextual tips for complex tasks, and timely reminders about security best practices.

This doesn’t mean long tutorials or cluttered help centers. The best banks bake guidance into the flow:

Educating users builds confidence, which builds trust. And that trust is measurable. Improving customer experience KPIs—like task success, time on task, and support calls—often comes down to clarity, not capability.

Improving your mobile banking UX is about testing, learning, and shipping with confidence.

Maze gives Product teams in financial services a fast, scalable way to uncover what users need—and how well their app delivers on it. Whether you're redesigning a login flow, refining a loan application process, or validating a new feature rollout, Maze helps you move forward with real evidence.

Here’s the top applications for Maze in optimizing your mobile app:

Before launching a new product or feature, you need to know that it makes sense to users. Maze offers multiple ways to test usability depending on what you're validating.

Sometimes, you need to hear what’s behind the hesitation.

With Maze Interview Studies, you can collect audio and video insights directly from your mobile users, whether they’re opening their first account or managing pensions. These insights are especially powerful for exploring customer experience in financial services: what people expect, what they worry about, and what actually makes them feel in control.

Plus, with Maze AI, you can quickly scan user interview transcripts, capture sentiment analysis, or have AI conduct thematic analysis to highlight key pain points.

The fastest way to improve an experience is to ask users what they want. With Maze’s Feedback Surveys, you can collect sentiment on everything from trust in new security prompts to satisfaction with your budgeting tools.

These are ideal for post-launch check-ins, or even running customer experience surveys that track how users feel over time.

With Maze’s mobile app, teams can test live product experiences on real devices. That means tapping through full flows, catching real-world friction, and hearing direct feedback while users are actually using your app.

No more testing mobile experiences on desktop. Whether you’re iterating on authentication, onboarding, or notifications, this kind of in-context testing gives you the confidence that your experience holds up when it matters most.

As more Vanquis Bank customers shifted to digital channels, the pressure was on to deliver a mobile experience that felt modern, intuitive, and trustworthy. But doing that at scale—and with speed—meant rethinking how research was done.

Previously, research meant moderated, in-person interviews at the Vanquis office. But that limited reach, slowed feedback, and left key product decisions unvalidated.

According to UX Researcher Rhys Hicks, “To deliver an app, we needed Maze.”

Since introducing Maze, the Vanquis team has:

From app rebrands to self-serve feature rollouts, Maze became Vanquis Bank’s go-to platform for testing everything—from button copy to architecture—before it hit production.

The result? A mobile banking experience grounded in real behavior, shaped by research, and continuously improving with every release.

What feels intuitive today might feel outdated tomorrow.

To keep up, you need systems that bring feedback into every decision. Continuous research, real user insights, and a way to test mobile experiences as they’re being built.

With a user testing tool like Maze, you can:

The future of digital banking belongs to the teams that build fast, test often, and listen continuously. With Maze, you’re already lightyears ahead of the competition.