With the development of technologies, human life is accelerating in all areas: we have to process a lot of information on our way to the office, while waiting in the queue for a cup of coffee and even while reading a book to your child. We are precipitately switching to mobile devices to keep up with our working processes and we turn on our PCs less and less often. Read in our new article how to maintain sales on the same level or even increase them and reduce risks while living at this tempo.
Trends in numbers
Over the last 5 years, the number of active Internet users has grown from 3 to 4 billion people; half of them are from Asia. At the end of 2019, the International Telecommunication Union published its annual “Measuring digital development. Fact and figures” report which says that there are 4.1 billion Internet users (53.6% of the world’s population) at the moment. The annual growth is estimated at 5.4%. The number of active mobile Internet users rapidly increases, with an 18.4 % year-on-year growth per 100 inhabitants. An important characteristic of Internet development in many countries is the systematic conversion from fixed connection to mobile subscriptions. It has been noted that before the appearance of smartphones, there were not so many households with Internet access in the world. “In recent years, however, more households in many countries have had Internet access than computers. This is because computers are no longer necessary to connect to the Internet, and many people connect using devices such as smartphones”, says the report. The Russian Ministry of Communications confirms this statistics: Internet traffic in Russia was 7% bigger in January—September 2019 than over the whole year of 2018.
Mobile device manufacturers fit up their gadgets with ever dishier stuff, and the users are steadily migrating towards mobile use only. This is why stable sales of many services can be maintained only supporting the dual system, when the web resource retains its broad functions and a handy mobile app is being developed at the same time.
Web vs. Mobile: Who Wins?
On our example we can only say that web and mobile channels are perfectly complementary, which means we should develop both directions at the same time. Using both options we help financial institutions and business community develop more rapidly. We could find the golden mean even for those clients who only use our mobile app and have come up with a unique solution: we recommend using our mobile libraries and install them in their native applications. This will allow processing a lot of data on the user’s device in a safe way to seamlessly evaluate the risks and gloss over better information value. All these functions are also available for web users, since we are present in both channels. This allows us to take care of our clients whatever platform they use.
Where to focus?
At the moment, the analytics do not expect complete rejection of fixed traffic. First, web resources have broader functionality; they can reach a wider audience, do not depend on the device, let easily update the information and manage how it is displayed without requiring any action from the website visitor. Apart from that, web resource is a cheaper solution in the terms of creation, development and support and tends to be less spending.
The mobile application allows identifying a potentially more loyal audience with lower risks, actively managing customer retention campaigns, but at the same time it can demand a sufficiently large number of actions from the potential user of the service and reduce conversion into sales. Moreover, the application has a much better multiproduct support. In addition to that, mobile application provides higher level of web-resource security as it may partially work autonomously from the main servers.
How we can help in this changing world?
Here we could cite a lot of theoretical examples but we would better talk about practice, that is, our experience. JuicyScore helps financial institutions to evaluate risks using both web and mobile channels. Let’s take a closer look at the working mechanisms. Our API is unified and identical for both web and mobile channels in regard of data collection and sharing, which simplifies integration and analysis of the data received, and its implementation into the decision-making system. We support cross-platform: we have created libraries for native applications of our client financial institutions for the two main platforms, Android and iOS, and we keep them up to date. Data collection via the mobile application is safe and corresponds with Apple and Google policies. While processing user device data, we do not analyse the content of private messages, SMS, or contact list. Data are aggregated across the entire stream: we identify the device and the user and provide a stable fingerprint regardless of the channel the applicant used to request the service. All risk factors, frequency characteristics and metrics are calculated across the entire stream rather than single channels.
Our SDKs give a number of opportunities for native applications of financial institutions:
1. Use of a broader stack of device and user authentication technologies, which allows to authenticate the device and its reference with one or more virtual users more accurately and thus reveal high-risk fraudulent activity (e.g. on connected devices, repeated devices, mass fraud cases);
2. Analysis of applications installed on the user’s device: information about particular applications installed on the mobile device without registration might indicate higher risk of the applicant, while registration in one or several apps usually gives positive impact on the risk level;
3. Possibility to identify and analyse more specifically technical characteristics of the device and the user’s behaviour related to it (for example, accelerometer and screen usage patterns may speak for some tinkering with the device and technical fraud or on the contrary, for some positive traits of the applicant and lower risks);
4. Use of geolocation information within the limits of accepted precision (100-1000 meters and with higher error): the collected data is enough to build up a set of risk indexes related to the location of the device itself and also the parameters of its network environment. The information does not become personal as it is not enough for unambiguous identification of the personal data subject.
In the modern world, the diversification approach has been applied for a long time already in many areas. In fact, we observe the same process in the digital world. Companies that offer their services only via mobile applications are acquiring skills of web management, expanding their functionality, and those working in the web area are trying to compress the range of their functionality to the quick and handy mobile interface. All this is done for the sole benefit of reaching ever larger audience, retaining the existing customers, and increasing the number of clients.