LeanCode at Mobile Trends Conference 2022: Summary and Conclusions

Being up to date with what happens in the mobile market is especially important for people who work in this industry. Therefore, LeanCode was present during the Mobile Trends Conference 2022 in Warsaw. During this edition, we were both on the #mobileBanking stage as speakers and in the audience as participants. It was inspiring to see how various industries have changed their approach to mobile solutions and how companies have dealt with their product challenges.

Read our summary of the event and the conclusions we drew from our favorite talks.

LeanCode with Credit Agricole on the Mobile Banking stage

• In our talk, we presented the case study of building the mobile banking app with Credit Agricole Bank Polska - probably one of the biggest Flutter projects in the world. This app was recently also showcased on Flutter.dev as an example of an excellent delivery based on this solid framework, and you can watch the video which summarizes the project.

Context: We have used this opportunity to present how the decision about betting on Flutter for this enterprise app was made. But firstly, let's understand why native technologies like Swift and Kotlin we abandoned. 

Years ago, when the banking industry considered mobile apps as something nice to have, building the mobile app with two separate teams for iOS and Android was reasonable with the limited scope of the mobile app. Nowadays, when mobile banking apps are the first and often only choice of users, updating the app to the constantly changing business requirements is more vital. Building native apps using native technologies and writing the same code twice for Android and iOS is time-consuming. 

Secondly, we've pointed out that a different design for both platforms is also far from the current market standard. If you follow an example of Twitter or UberEats platform, you can easily see the opposite is true. Modern brands try to unify the experience across the interfaces, making them unique and distinguishable on the market. The design system is part of the branding system, and those apps are specifically made to look the same. Moreover, building separate design systems for iOS and Android using the Material Design and Human Interface Guidelines is time-consuming and makes the feature-to-market release cycles longer.

Other arguments worth mentioning against building native apps are the longer stabilization, duplication of UI Automated tests, complicated release cycles and app versioning, and complicated customer care processes. 

Conclusions: As a result of this analysis, it became clear that the only way the new banking app could be built was by adopting cross-platform solutions. In our talk, we have presented why the existing alternatives like Xamarin and React Native are inferior to Flutter and why this technology is destined to win in the long run.

For more information on Flutter, please follow our guide to Flutter to understand if Flutter is ready for your business. 

Mobile Trends Conference 2022: favorite talks

1. How to build an application with your own identity based on a well-known brand?

A case study of the InPost Fresh application by Paweł Cudzich (iteo) and Agnieszka Wojtaszek (InPost) (stage: mobile Inspirations).

Context: Iteo is a software house that has established long-term cooperation with InPost (a parcel locker service). Currently, 9.6 million users use the "InPost Mobile" application (data from 2022), and the company offers services in the Polish, French, and UK markets. InPost decided to expand its offer and conquer a new market segment with an advanced e-grocery application - "InPost Fresh."

Conclusions: What was especially interesting in this case was that new apps belonging to one brand may mimic some patterns and components that made the first application easy to use. Of course, the new app required some modifications, for example, in terms of the UX and UI design, but thanks to a scalable code base focused on the business domain, they kept many UI components from the first app reusable. It is definitely worth using proven solutions, especially if they have been tested on a large number of users.

2. Digital accessibility in mobile applications (WCAG).

Talk by Daria Bazydło-Egier and Przemysław Marcinowski (Fundacja Widzialni) (stage: mobile UX).

Context: The Widzialni Foundation (Fundacja Widzialni) monitors the level of application of the international accessibility standard WCAG 2.1 by the Polish administration. Their main goal is to give all citizens free access to Internet resources, regardless of age, disability, wealth, hardware, and software.

Conclusions: During this talk, the Foundation presented the example of an audiobook store application and showed how many navigation buttons, but also visual elements were wrongly named. As a result, the text-reading program conveyed incomprehensible messages to the user, and it was practically impossible to perform any action. It gave a broader view of the importance of WCAG implementation and the need for dev teams to consider it earlier - during the development process.

3. Banking in difficult times. How have the pandemic, war, and inflation changed mobile banking?

Talk by Paweł Haltos and Andrzej Szewczyk (Efigence) (stage: mobile Banking).

Context: Efigence specializes in designing a customer experience, delivering and implementing technology, and consulting in innovation for banks and financial services. They constantly monitor users' changing behavior and analyze changes in the world. Taking into account these factors and many others, they forecast trends for banking.

Conclusions: One of the currently leading trends in banking is cognitive banking. Cognitive banking means banks can now study each customer's behavior based on the financial information received. However, banks should use this knowledge to ensure financial wellness for their customers. It means supporting customers in spending less, saving, and taking care of their financial health during crises like a pandemic, war, or inflation. Another direction is promoting eco-friendly choices by, for example, informing you which company out of those you buy from is sustainable or showing you how you lower your carbon footprint by choosing public transport and giving you extra points for that.

4. The best experiences in a mobile application for individual and corporate clients - how we develop SGB Mobile!

Talk by Artur Józefowski (SGB-Bank) and Patrycja Leszek-Królikowska (Ailleron) (stage: mobile Banking).

Context: The activity of SGB-Bank is focused on providing SGB Cooperative Banks with modern and safe financial solutions that meet the needs of local communities. Two years ago, they joined forces with the software house Ailleron to build their new mobile application that can be used further by each of the banks in the Cooperative Banks group. This time they presented another step of their product development.

Conclusions: Each mobile banking application has its original solutions that make banks stand out with their offer on the market. However, our attention was drawn to the way in which the bank/client and the technology company/provider have been working. Their cooperation proves that a huge development team is not always necessary, even in the case of a large-scale banking project. Fewer people can also generate great results if a team is agile, knowledgeable, and well-managed. In addition, the team met every day during the cooperation, which shows great commitment.

5. How to acquire customers by building Value Added Services?

Talk by Radosław Janusz (PKO Bank Polski) (stage: mobile Banking).

Context: In an ever-changing banking environment, it is harder to attract users to daily banking without the complex offer of value-added services. PKO Bank Polski brought that to the next level by offering the API for external providers who can embed their VAS through the unified channel. Leveraging API opportunity and Bank's Capital Group strength to offer innovative solutions for their clients is a part of their long-term strategy.

Conclusions: Banking apps in different markets try to adopt value-added services (VAS) as their differentiation strategy. Integrating with each VAS separately is time-consuming and hard to include on the roadmap. Therefore the solution could be to open the banking ecosystem through API integrations with external players and to unify the integration procedure. There aren’t many banks on the market yet that would approach VAS integration with their mobile banking app in such a way. For example. OTP Bank (Hungary) offers customers over 40 value-added services but provides them via their separate mobile app called “Simple.”

Summing up

Trends in the mobile industry are changing dynamically since many depend on the users' behavior and preferences. Nowadays, we use mobile applications almost for everything: communication (business and private), at work (video meetings, business tools), entertainment (games, streaming audio and video platforms), daily activities (maps, ticket purchase, banking, shopping, official matters) and many more cases.

During this edition of Mobile Trends Conference 2022, we especially enjoyed talks from the #mobileInspirations and the #mobileBanking stage. But it was possible to receive valuable insights almost everywhere since there were many conversations in between. We're glad that LeanCode also had a chance to share our point of view on how technology - Flutter - can provide a competitive advantage in such a dynamically developing industry as banking.

Check out our other article if you want to read more about what experts think about building banking apps with Flutter.