South Africa’s First National Bank (FNB) has released a new Banking App for tablets, tapping into the growing number of users in the country as part of a wider tablet device strategy.
The app can be downloaded from today from app stores across Apple, Android and Windows 8 devices.
“The new Banking App, designed specifically for tablet devices, was developed with ease-of-use as a key priority and utilises the full capability of the latest tablet devices,” said Farren Roper, head of connect ISP and business operations at FNB.
“It is completely custom-made and not a re-skin of our existing smartphone app.”
Research firm IDC reports year-on-year sales of tablet devices have grown by 78.4 per cent, with sales of laptop and desktop computers declining by 4.1 per cent. IDC believes tablet shipments will surpass desktop PC shipments for the first time this year.
South Africa itself has more than one million tablets in circulation, providing a market for FNB to tap into with its new application.
“We decided to build a customised app in order to offer consumers a fully immersive app that includes touch screen tablet banking, with features like drag and drop, swiping and double tapping all of which make for a great user experience,” said Roper.
FNB says the new app is “content rich, both inside and outside of login”, and provides FNB customers with content customised content according to their profile. Non-FNB customers can gain access to information on the bank’s products and promotions.
It also allows new customers to open an FNB account via the app, a first for a South African retail bank.
FNB was recently declared the best bank in South Africa and one of the most innovative in the world at the Financial Global Banking Awards in Washington DC, USA, while the South African Customer Satisfaction Index (SAcsi) revealed FNB as the bank with the most satisfied customers following research conducted with 6,582 respondents.
The bank announced in February its Banking App had reached 400,000 users.
