BDO Unibank, Inc. or simply BDO, the Philippines' largest universal bank in terms of total assets, owes the unenviable distinction of having the most reviled banking app in the country today.
For BDO, it comes with the territory: its industry-leading value in assets aside, the bank also leads the pack in terms of deposits and the most number of brick and mortar branches at over 1,300 scattered across the country.
Statistically, therefore, serving the most number of clients means getting the most number of probable complaints, too.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, clients' woes with BDO go a long way, no doubt exacerbated by the recent forceful shift to digital banking of millions of Filipinos held hostage by restrictions in mobility imposed by both national and local governments in response to the COVID-19 crisis.
Caught flat-footed
It is as if BDO was caught flat-footed, unable to deal with the surge in the number of its clients using its BDO Digital Banking app either to transfer money or pay bills. The app simply doesn't work; signing in, for starters, is a near impossibility.
It would have been completely understandable if these technical problems lingered for a month at most, given how nobody could have reasonably anticipated region-wide quarantine lockdowns becoming the norm.
Instead, there is a general sentiment that more than half a year since the island of Luzon was placed on enhanced community quarantine (ECQ), BDO has done little to nothing to address the grating slowness, if not outright uselessness, of its app at a time when people needed to tap their money to survive.
This sentiment is echoed across all corners of the digital realm, more poignantly on Google Play Store, where the BDO Digital Banking app has been rated 1.5 stars out of 5 stars by more than 43,000 users. In terms of app development, this rating is beyond abysmal. Transposed to the physical world, this rating is probably one that lies on the pitch-black surface of the Molloy Deep in the Arctic.
Scour social media sites for BDO app reviews and one is greeted by a full spectrum of emotions ranging from sheer aghast to hopeless surrender.
It is safe to assume that the bank's top honchos, as well as the developers of its digital banking app, are cognizant of the bank's failure to deliver seamless digital banking service when it is needed the most. One would expect that there would be improvements made over the course of the pandemic, but as it were, things are as bad, if not worse, than before.
As the largest and most profitable universal bank in the country, BDO is well in a position to make its app work. With billions in assets, how difficult is it to come up with a user-friendly and intuitively designed platform with well thought-out features and functions?
Very difficult, apparently.
Because borders remain locked and people's mobility is still severely restricted, BDO's clients have no choice but to put up with the app along with all the attendant inconvenience and headaches it brings. BDO's inability to address the usability of its digital banking puts it at a precarious position because people's suffering can only last so long, especially when better options afforded by the likes of all-digital banks are available.
In a post-COVID world, a highly traditional and heavily profit-oriented enterprise that seems far removed from the woes of the clients it is making money from, with a clunky app to boot, is dead meat.