Mobile Nudging: Answering the Challenges of Churn and Youth Disengagement in Mobile-Banking

Purpose&#13;\nThe retention of the youth market is an important concern for banks and their marketers. With the increased use of mobile phones, banks are presented with new opportunities to reach young customers whose behaviour confirm low loyalty and high churn in a by now mature mobile interface market. This thesis investigates how a considered intuitive design of mobile banking interfaces could provide new perspectives towards the continued engagement of young customers. &#13;\nDesign&#13;\nThe project introduces behavioural economic constructs in the design of the mobile banking applications that promote continuance usage. Their role and potential for customer retention is explored through a series of decisive nudges based on seven behavioural economic constructs that specifically target the churn of the youth market in an m-banking environment. The research is bolstered by triangulation methods and perspectives. A sequential mixed-methods approach covers exploratory, assessment, confirmatory and explanatory stages and applies qualitative and quantitative methodologies. It introduces three different sources of very substantive participant samples, which includes young students, a combination of experts from different disciplines realted to mobile interafaces from the banking industry and their creative agency and young mobile banking users. &#13;\nFindings&#13;\nThe project shows how a weighted mix of nudge features based on a variety of consciously applied constructs could be designed, tested and introduced. Results indicate that the most important general behavioural economic constructs for the youth market are ‘loss aversion’ and ‘the power of now’, while scarcity value was the least preferred. &#13;\nImplications / limitations &#13;\nThe study’s focus on a managerial pursuit that addresses retention of young customers through mobile banking fills a gap in the mobile banking literature where there is little applied research combining behavioural economics and planning. The successful engagement of customers through m-banking could be enhanced if banks, mobile banking interface designers and marketers work together to focus on creating mobile nudges that engage intuitive and impulsive processes to influence an individual’s behaviour as part of a long term strategy for promoting behavioural change in young customers that tend to churn. Although the research provides the extensive multi-persepctvies learnings from producers and consumers on the basis of a rich case study, the outcomes contain learnings for mobile banking category in general and foir mobile engagement strategies across industries. &#13;\nPractical Implications&#13;\nThis study contributes to research on mobile banking retention and represents a shift from the waning certainties of grand designs and strategies to a structured approach that uses small emotive interventions to weave components that fit into a bigger narrative of the brand itself, while contributing towards customer retention in the youth market. It proves that a common theoretical framework has the potential to generate productive creative conversations between a variety of professional discplines, such as design, customer relation planning and business stragety, in a rapidly developing, impatient, highly demanding and saturated interface market. &#13;\nSocial implications &#13;\nThe thesis discusses the broader resonance of social sharing and contextual value against the backdrop of the ethical narrative (for the bank in question) of Being Good with Money. The public attitude in relation to privacy and personalization, specifically in relation to the individualized finances and banking services, are shown to be fundamental cultural factors in the creation of new intuitive nudges. &#13;\nOriginality/value&#13;\nDespite the evolvement of interface platforms, the topic of mobile banking retention has attracted little attention in comparison to research on mobile banking adoption and the attraction of new customers. The study’s focus on a managerial pursuit that addresses retention of young customers through mobile banking fills a gap in the mobile banking literature where there is little applied research combining behavioural economics and strategic planning. The thesis provides a fresh view to a balanced cognitive and behavioural approach in the conjoint analysis of inuitive nudges. &#13;\nKeywords: Mobile-banking, behavioural economics, nudging, planning, customer churn, customer engagement, youth market, interface design.

Topic: FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance
Subfield: Management Information Systems
Field: Business, Management and Accounting
Domain: Social Sciences