CommBank shows you the money with new tablet app
Commonwealth Bank has updated its tablet app for Android and iOS, bringing a stronger focus on graphics, animation and data visualisation to make more sense of your dollars and cents.
- Webby Award Winner (Best Video Host, 2021), Webby Nominee (Podcasts, 2021), Gold Telly (Documentary Series, 2021), Silver Telly (Video Writing, 2021), W3 Award (Best Host, 2020), Australian IT Journalism Awards (Best Journalist, Best News Journalist 2017)
Commonwealth Bank has announced the launch of a new graphics-heavy tablet app that it hopes will engage customers with their finances and bring some excitement to the dry world of internet banking.
Rather than the lines of numbers, the tablet app has a much stronger focus on visualisations and animations that bring banking data to life.
According to Commonwealth Bank's CIO Retail & Wealth, Pete Steel, while the CommBank mobile app has its place for day to day use, the bank was looking to offer more on tablet devices.
"People use the mobile app on their phone on a bus or in a cafe, but at night there are a lot of people that are using a tablet, and it's probably that TV-and-tablet experience on the couch," he said. "So we've thought about making it quite a tailored experience for the device and fitting the usage scenarios for customers."
That tailored experience is based around large tiles that show different parts of a customer's "whole wealth position" in the big picture, with the option of diving deeper into different accounts and transactions.
Users can view all their different accounts in the Accounts tab, with a timeline-style Running Balance showing daily fluctuations in funds. By entering their monthly wage (which can also be cross-referenced against monthly deposits) users can also take advantage of a Savings Tracker that shows how much of their pay packet remains at the end of the month, and gives the option of depositing it into savings.
A 'Portfolio' tab tracks assets and liabilities, not only from CommBank but also from other institutions (with manual input), meaning customers can see their cash savings offset against their mortgage, superannuation and shares.
The bank has also focused its energy on transforming numbers into easy-to-understand graphics to give a better picture of your bottom line. So transferring between accounts is a matter of dragging and dropping large tiles, while account history is colour-coded to show incoming money in green, with different sized dots next to the amount that match the size of the transaction.
"It's a new type of experience, particularly with this fun visualisation" said Steel. "We've tried to make it more holistic as well, to understand all your wealth and start to explore it. And if people start to understand it better, they're more likely to take a bit of guidance...and do something about it."
The CommBank App for Tablet is available now from the Google Play store for Android devices, and can be downloaded for iPad from the App Store.
Update, July 9 at 4:55 p.m. AEST: Included details for iPad download after CommBank announced an iOS version of the app.