A new report from Mixpanel shows user behavior across the financial industry

Looks at 34 billion actions across 189 different financial services

The financial industry relies on pure data more than most. Emotion is rarely important, but data can be the difference between success and failure.

A new report from Mixpanel looks at the financial industry to analyze user adoption, growth, retention, and conversion rates. The study looks at five different sectors - banking, trading and crypto, personal finance, insurance, and money transfer.

When looking at growth, monthly average daily user growth is on the upswing in the finance industry, holding steady at 6%. For companies in the 90th percentile, however, those numbers shoot way up, coming in at an impressive 57%. When looking at "stickiness," or Daily Active Users divided by Monthly Active users, of the different products, personal finance led the way, at 27% in the 90th percentile, and 8% in the median. Insurance was at the bottom with only 4% stickiness. This can somewhat be accounted for due to the nature of insurance, however. 

When looking at the stickiness of different financial platforms (mobile app, desktop web, and mobile web), mobile apps take the definitive lead. With mobile apps, the median percentage (10%) is higher than that of the 90th percentile numbers of desktop (5%) and mobile web (4.8%). This should be taken somewhat lightly, however, as users have to manually download the app to begin with, showing that there is intent from the start.

The study also looks at retention rates of these different platforms, with mobile apps leading the way, again. From the study,

"Mobile apps retained 43% of their users after the first month, and still had 25% of them after four months. Conversely, desktop web products dropped to around 30% after the first month, hitting just under 20% after four months. Mobile web was the lowest, hitting 20% after a month, and around 10% at month four."

The study also looks a bit at cryptocurrency and trading, with the big takeaway being that crypto user growth is directly tied with the price of Bitcoin. 

As more physical locations of banks close, understanding the data that drives your online presence is paramount when understanding your customer base. This study really helps dive into some of the intricacies of the finance industry in regards to technology.

You can look at the full report here.