5 Ways You Didn’t Know You Could Use Your Mobile Banking App

Since their invention, the convenience and security of mobile banking apps have appealed to a large number of consumers including the younger population.

According to a report by Nairametrics, in 2020, e-transactions in Nigeria (mobile & USSD) surged by 82.6% to stand at N1.69 billion compared to N928.86 million recorded in the previous year. Also, customers between the ages of 25 and 34 years carried out 36% of all interbank instant payments.

Many people are switching to mobile apps because it makes previously time-consuming and laborious operations like money depositing and cash transfers swift.

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Many banks now offer a lot of their services to their customers with just a swipe, however, the Fintech industry has expanded to include banks that are solely digital like Nigeria’s first digital bank, ALAT by Wema.

Although many people now use their banking apps to make transactions, there are some features that are underused and overlooked that can make your life much easier than it is.

5 Ways You Didn’t Know You Could Use Your Mobile Banking App

1. Pay bills promptly and conveniently: The process is very similar to making a transfer. You can schedule payments on your banking app, especially when you need to pay bills like water, electricity, etc.

The ALAT app also allows you to collate all your bills and help you automate the payment.

2. Keep track of transactions: You can also check your transaction summary to see a list of payments with information for the payee, amount, and date for payments that are both scheduled and recently sent. You can monitor your account balance, track spending or transactions and make easy money transfers.

This required requesting a bank statement which took days to get, but now all you have to do is scroll through and some apps even show you graphs of your income, savings, and expenditure.

3. Automate your savings: This is one of the most interesting features of banking apps, but it is severely under-used.

You can easily automate your savings i.e your bank transfers a certain amount of money daily, weekly, or monthly from your account balance to your savings.

ALAT Savings Goals takes this basic feature up a notch. With the saving goals, you can create different goals for different things, including rent, a trip, a new phone, etc, that way, you have different purses for different items.

4. Virtual payments: With the advent of online stores, more and more people are getting apprehensive about overusing their credit/debit cards to pay online stores because of cyber fraud. Now banks have virtual cards which are accessible via mobile bank apps. The cards have the same function as the regular ATM cards except that it is purely virtual.

5. Security: When you place a lock on your debit or ATM card via Online or Mobile Banking, it will prevent most types of card transactions from being processed until you take action to unlock your card. Any virtual cards linked to the locked card will also be locked. However, the lock may not stop card transactions presented as a new recurring or a previously scheduled recurring transaction by the merchant, transactions using other cards linked to your deposit account, or the posting of refunds or credit adjustments to your account. Transactions that occurred before locking the card will not be affected. Locking your card is not a replacement for reporting your card lost or stolen.

The next question will be, how well are you using your banking app?

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