ROYAL Bank of Scotland has unveiled a series of enhancements to its mobile banking app to let its 860,000 users do even more on the move, writes Greg Russell.
And, in what’s thought to be an industry first, the Royal National Institute for Blind People (RNIB) was brought in to help ensure the 160 visual and audio modifications carried out made it more user-friendly for anyone with sight problems.
The extensive redesign will mean that tasks that had been extremely difficult or impossible for blind and partially sighted people to complete – such as viewing transactions, transferring money between accounts and making payments – will now become much easier.
Customers will be able to set up a new payee and pay up to £250 without the need for a card reader, making it faster, easier and more convenient to pay someone new.
They will also now be able to create and cancel standing orders and stop direct debits.
RBS says that on average, 383,000 customers log into mobile banking every day, with around 44,000 payments made in each 24-hour period.
Martin Wise, its director of digital banking, said: “I’m delighted that we’ve been able to introduce a whole new raft of features to our app and I’m particularly proud of the fact that we’ve made major changes to the design to make it far easier for our blind and partially sighted customers to use.
“Our customers now do more of their banking on their mobile phone than on their computer, so we’re making sure that customers can manage their finances more easily through our app and we’ll be working hard to make even more improvements to it in the months to come.”
The changes were welcomed by Steve Tyler, from RNIB, who added: “This new Royal Bank of Scotland app provides their customers with access to their bank account via a mobile. It’s a service that is available to all their customers, but has been tested to ensure that it is easy to use by blind and partially sighted people.
“The app offers lots of benefits including transferring money between accounts, making payments, fingerprint login and the ‘get cash’ feature whereby the user is sent a code which is then inputted into an ATM in order to get cash out – what’s also great is that blind and partially sighted people have access to the same app as their sighted peers, at the same time.”
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