In recent years, Fali APP has become a “distinguished learning” in the banking industry.

The "2019 Banking Industry Electronic Banking Scenario Marketing Analysis Report" gives a set of data: There are 4,066 commercial banks in my country, of which more than 90 institutions have independent APPs. According to incomplete statistics from TMTpost, my country's 18 leading banks - 6 large commercial banks and 12 joint-stock banks - have developed more than 170 apps, and even Bank of China alone has 36 apps.

The trend of collective transformation in the banking industry is obvious. Traditional growth dividend channels are increasingly collapsing. APP has become a new continent that banks urgently need to compete for. However, the above-mentioned report also gives a data that the opening rate of bank APP is less than 50%. With the advent of the APP, acquiring and retaining customers has become a common problem for a large number of mobile banking apps.

Although the bank APP war is difficult to fight, it must be fought. Against this background, bank APPs are trying to get rid of the constraints of relatively low-frequency financial scenarios and try their best to integrate into high-frequency scenarios in users' daily lives to increase usage and enhance user stickiness.

As an old joint-stock bank that issued the first real credit card in China, China Guangfa Bank is a typical example. Recently, it officially announced the launch of the "Discover Wonderful 5.0" version, claiming that it will focus on the layout of the consumer ecology. Focus on travel, shopping, catering and other fields.

Zhang Guoliang, director of operations and development of GF Credit Card Center, revealed in an exclusive interview with TMTpost Media APP that as of the end of October, the number of Discovery Wonderful APP users exceeded 50 million, with monthly active users exceeding 18 million. Zhang Guoliang led 5 iterations of Discovery Wonderful in 5 years.

"Especially for credit cards, its main competitors are not just banks, they must adapt to the competition and style of play in the Internet industry." Zhang Guoliang said, "In the next two to three years, No matter in terms of total registered users or traffic, my goal is to double.”

Zhang Guoliang, Director of Operations and Development of GF Credit Card Center

Zhang Guoliang summarized the upgrade to Titanium Media. The key point:

As a result, meal tickets, movie tickets, daily payment, travel, shopping, etc. all appear on this bank App. If you don’t remind yourself that this is a banking APP, you may suspect that what you are opening is a lifestyle APP.

But it is undeniable that while they are iteratively optimizing, the homogeneity phenomenon among bank APPs is becoming more and more prominent, and the functions of the products are becoming increasingly the same. How should differences be reflected when everyone looks similar? In this regard, Zhang Guoliang introduced to TMTpost the two main ideas of GF:

The first is to seek deeper and more comprehensive services on the same functions. Zhang Guoliang emphasized the "car owner module" to provide one-stop services around the needs of car owners, that is, test drive, car purchase, refueling, and maintenance services will be introduced in the APP. In the future, services such as car insurance, driving, and car moving will also be launched. For car purchases, users can get discounts on installment loans. At present, GAC NIO, Chery, Hongqi and other brands have cooperated. In addition, Tuhu Car Care has also opened an official flagship store in the APP.

Secondly, in terms of overall functionality, we seek a better user experience. Zhang Guoliang focused on the case of "intelligent customer service". According to him, for vague questions such as "How much is the annual card application fee?", the customer service robot can currently independently locate "What kind of card is it? What level of card is this?" Then guide customers step by step to ask the questions they want to ask. Usually, when a customer service robot encounters a vague problem, it can only reply mechanically, "I don't understand your question very well yet. I suggest you ask another way."

"There is a need behind this Strong technical capabilities. Only with iterative capabilities and customer analysis capabilities can you have a better user experience. Users may see similar things, but the customer experience is very different,” Zhang Guoliang said.

Financial institutions’ understanding of life scenarios and traffic operations have been intuitively demonstrated in the iteration of bank APPs. It is easy to be reminded of the definition of Bank4.0 by the famous futurist and banker Brett King: “The utility and experience of banking services will be completely separated from physical branches and physical branch-based channels. ”

This is almost exactly the same as what GF is currently doing.

But the second half of Bright’s prediction is that the utility and experience of banking services will no longer be attached to a specific financial product, but will be directly embedded in our daily life scenes. For example, if you tell the Amazon speaker that you want to buy something, the payment is completed; as soon as you open the refrigerator and see that something is missing, it will notify the merchant to deliver it to your door.

According to this understanding, this has almost become a "dismembered" bank. The bank has become a variety of services and does not belong to itself. Accounts are out, payments are out, loans are outside, and deposits are outside. Also outside.

As a bank practitioner, Zhang Guoliang proposed a hot word in the marketing circle - private domain traffic. The so-called private domain traffic is a concept based on traffic pools. Traffic pools refer to huge traffic, such as Taobao, Baidu, Weibo, etc. As long as the budget is sufficient, new users can be acquired continuously. Private domain traffic is relatively speaking, it refers to a channel that can directly reach users at any time and any frequency without paying.

Zhang Guoliang said that under the pressure of traffic management, banking apps have chosen to purchase traffic from outside to acquire customers. However, traffic costs are getting more and more expensive, and it is unsustainable to rely solely on external traffic. In this context, it is particularly important to make your APP bigger and stronger. APP has become the main battlefield for banks, and only through APP can they obtain customers in their own scenarios and at the same time have the right to operate the scenarios.

Utilizing the public domain on one hand and establishing the private domain on the other constitute the bank’s traffic strategy.

In Zhang Guoliang’s view, the concept of the ecosystem emphasized this time is precisely to form his own private domain traffic, that is, to provide in-depth and comprehensive services around an industry. When it is difficult for users to obtain similar services through other channels, When serving, traffic will naturally tend to this channel. In the public domain channel, he said that bank customers will not be turned into “traffic from other channels” just to attract traffic.

Obviously, "dismembering" oneself is obviously not an option that banks are willing to choose. Banks want to compete with Internet companies, rather than being counterattacked by Internet giants.

At the same time as the upgrade, Discovery APP also jointly released the "2020 New White-Collar Consumer Behavior Research Report" with iResearch Consulting. According to the definition of this report, the new white-collar group is a new middle-class group that is nearly 30 years old, owns a house and a car, has a monthly income of over 10,000 yuan, and has a monthly income balance of 11%. Their daily consumption accounts for about 47% of their monthly income, concentrated at 6,000-8,000 yuan, and mortgage and car loans account for about 42% of their monthly income, concentrated at 3,500-6,000 yuan.

Through this consumption report for young people, we may be able to find several directions for the future development of bank APPs, especially credit card APPs.

First of all, will bank APPs have more and more functions? The answer must be yes. The report pointed out that "72.9% of the new middle class prefer to use integrated APPs, and the types of services they most expect to integrate are basic daily life services, information about food, drink and entertainment, and product recommendation information."

It also uses Alipay as the For example, based on the original "high-frequency" payment scenarios, "low-frequency" scenarios within the platform such as life, shopping, eating, drinking and entertainment are added to increase the stickiness of use. Therefore, the report recommends that credit card APPs introduce life and shopping ecology based on "high-frequency" financial scenarios to attract users to use credit cards in scenarios.

One detail is that, according to the report, “During the epidemic, credit card APP has surpassed Meituan as a tool for finding discounts and selecting restaurants.

”

For the credit card industry, this number and the trend behind it are obvious positive factors.

Looking back on the entire development process of Internet finance, payment is almost the industry development The logical starting point. Taking Ant Group as an example, mobile payment is the unshakable starting point of the entire business model. It is the entrance to almost all of Ant Group’s businesses and the basis for its high valuation by the market before.

With the gradual implementation of new regulations for online small loans, Internet giants and credit cards will be almost brought to the same starting line in the future credit business, and opportunities will return to banks.

( This article was first published on Titanium Media APP, author | Cai Pengcheng, editor | Tianpeng)