Barclays Bank pretty proud of their Windows Phone app

OnWindows.com is carrying an article, I suspect sponsored by Barclays Bank, in which they talk about their Windows Phone app, and it seems the bank is pretty proud of their efforts.

They report that the app was the outcome of their September 2013 You Bank initiative, where members of the public could vote for features.

Darren Foulds, managing director of Barclays Mobile and Pingit reports that one of the most popular ideas to come out of Your Bank was to make the Barclays Mobile Banking app available on the Windows platform.

“The Barclays Mobile Banking app has been available on other platforms for some time now. But we are committed to supporting the platforms that customers demand,” says Foulds. “We’ve witnessed Windows growing in scale through customer feedback, and so it was important that we made our mobile banking app available on the Windows platform.”

Barclays developed the app working closely with Microsoft to ensure it offered a good user experience. “Our developers have reported they found the development process really straight forward,” says Foulds. “In particular, they were impressed with the ability to access a launch environment through a beta version of the app. This ensured that we were able to perform additional testing of the app before putting it live to customers.”

Foulds reports the Barclays bank app has a number of stand-out features such as ‘Call us’ which gives customers the ability to initiate a phone call with an advisor within mobile banking, without having to go through additional security checks, which was previously a real pain point for customers.

The ability to instantly transact on a smartphone is particularly popular with customers.

“You can even apply for a loan using your phone. One customer was so impressed by this feature, they contacted us to describe their experience,” explains Foulds. “This particular customer was looking to buy a new car. The dealership salesman offered them a new finance package but the customer remembered that they had been pre-approved for a Barclays’ loan. While the customer was still at the dealership, they accessed their account through the Barclays Mobile Banking app and discovered that they could get the money they needed to borrow in order to buy the car at a much cheaper rate. The customer applied for the Barclays loan and the money was credited into their account – there and then.”

“All the way through the design, build and production of the Barclays Mobile Banking app for Windows Phone, the team was focused on a quality, native experience,” says Richard Peers, director, Financial Services at Microsoft. “This has clearly paid off as they have 5,000 glowing reviews and are the best rated app on the UK store.”

Barclays measures its customer satisfaction using the Net Promoter approach, and has achieved some of its highest scores for mobile banking out of all of the banks’ services – a Net Promoter score of +62. Furthermore, Barclays is continuing to maintain a five-star rating for its app in the Windows store, out of nearly 5,000 customer reviews.

Barclays followed up with the Barclays Pingit for Windows Phone 8.

“Because of customer demand and the success of the Barclays Mobile Banking Windows Phone 8 app, it was essential that we developed Barclays Pingit on the Windows platform,” says Foulds.

As a regular user of the Barclays Bank app I can say  the app is pretty full featured, and the team should be rightly proud.  Do our readers agree?