Mobile Strategy for a Fortune 500 Financial Services Company
Client Profile
- The client is a direct banking and payment services company with one of the most recognized brands in U.S. financial services.
Business Case
- The customer was looking for a long term mobile strategy to stay competitive with other industry rivals by offering comparable or better product offerings on portable handheld / tablet devices for its growing customer base.
- A primary focus was to choose a framework that meets existing and future market penetration goals while maintaining relevant presence via existing and new application functionality offerings on latest / upcoming mobile and tablet devices and maintaining cross-platform compatibility.
- Another key requirement was to completely re-design the existing web based mobile app/mobile website for enhanced user experience. A new tablet application was proposed with functional and UI design enhancements to leverage the bigger & higher resolution (retina/Super HD) display for an optimal tablet experience.
BitWise Solution
BitWise Mobile Center of Excellence team analyzed the client requirements, existing application features and development methodology to identify the limitations of client’s existing mobile solution:
- Application maintainability challenges across device vendor platforms – separate applications were being developed and maintained for iOS, Android and Blackberry devices.
- Application latency & responsiveness issues due to traditional web UI standards – the existing application was built using legacy html / css artifacts that do not leverage the new features available with html 5 / css3 that also posts a stronger emphasis on lightweight network interaction
- Ever expanding pool of portable devices – the current architecture did not provide a scalable solution that could be quickly ported to new device and device platforms (ex: windows phones) while keeping the total cost of ownership (TCO) down
To overcome the aforementioned limitations of the existing design and to put in place a more scalable and cost effective mobile strategy in place various design and technology enhancements were proposed and implemented by BitWise:
- Helped porting various native application flavors to a standard Mobile development framework – Adobe PhoneGAP
- Redesigned the UI interface along with customer teams using the jQueryMobile touch-optimized web framework built on javascript, html5 and css3 to create a unified application experience supported across various devices and OS versions
- Decoupled the mobile website along with customer teams from native application and bundled jQueryMobile UI artifacts within the native app to provide a much needed performance boost that exponentially enhanced the responsiveness of the native application. Newer RESTful services were built to support the backend data, authentication and security requirements for the native app.
- Added a number of new features and functionality based on business requirements to enhance the user experience and bridge the feature gap between client’s full website and mobile app.
These enhanced features provide customers the ability to:
- View credit card account activities
- View credit card statements
- Perform bill payments and view payment history
- Perform mobile payments (person to person money transfer),
- View and modify customer profile information
- Redeem reward points for cash, credit or merchant gift certificates, etc
- Used a cloud based testing solution from perfecto mobile to enable multi device / multi-platform testing of the mobile and tablet applications across the most popular customer devices and various OS versions to ensure all device compatibility issues are preemptively identified and alleviated providing a rapid testing turnaround.
Technology Spectrum
Backend: J2EE (Struts, EJB), Web Services, RESTful services, Oracle11g, DB2, CICS
Frontend: jQueryMobile, PhoneGAP, HTML5, AJAX, JSON, JSONP, Javascript, CSS3
Testing Tool: Perfecto Mobile, Ripple emulator, Android SDK emulator
Targeted Devices: iPhone/iPad (All generations), Android (Handsets & Tablets), Blackberry Bold
Business Benefit
BitWise helped the customer realize the following business benefits:
- Substantially improved the design and performance of the mobile application
- Reached out to a wider customer audience which includes major advanced mobile users as well as iPad & android tablet users resulting in increased customer satisfaction and market relevance
- Within a week of iPad application launch on app store, the application ranked :
- #1 application in ‘Financial’ category in app store
- #7 application in all categories apps in app store
- Apple iPad ‘Favorites’ & 4+ rating