Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Banking loyalty is no longer built in branches with handshakes; it is forged in the milliseconds it takes for an app to load a balance. In the latest episode of The Fintech Podcast, Juanjo Gómez, Head of Marketing at Coinscrap Finance, sat down with Sebastián Pillado, Country Manager for Spain at Movizzon, to discuss a reality redefining the financial landscape: User Experience (UX) has ceased to be an “add-on” and has become the critical factor for customer retention.
Sebastián Pillado,“The expectation today is for everything to go very well the first time and very quickly.”
Country Manager for Spain at Movizzon.
The dictatorship of immediacy: 12 seconds is one hour
The standard for quality is no longer set by direct banking competitors, but by the daily experiences users have on platforms like Amazon or Instagram. This “transfer of expectations” has made users extremely impatient.
During the talk, Sebastián shared a graphic analogy that perfectly illustrates the pressure under which financial applications operate:
Juanjo Gómez: Sebastián, I saw a striking data point in your reports: a 12-second wait in an app is emotionally equivalent to an hour-long queue in a physical branch. Are we truly that impatient?
Sebastián Pillado: Absolutely. The expectation today is for everything to go very well the first time and very quickly. At Movizzon, we use the Apdex index to objectivize this: if an interaction takes between 0 and 5 seconds, it’s a satisfactory experience. Neutral is 5 to 12. But over 12 seconds? It is directly frustrating. Customers don’t compare their banking app with another bank; they compare it with the instant content of their social media feeds.
This level of demand explains why 50% of customers in Spain consider switching banks if the digital experience is not up to par. UX is no longer a “nice-to-have”; it is a “must” for business survival.
“Invisible errors”: The Blind Spot of financial entities
A major challenge for IT departments is that their traditional monitoring systems often show “all green” while users suffer frictions in silence or complain on social media. These are what Pillado calls invisible errors.
Juanjo Gómez: How do you define availability from the end-user perspective, beyond whether a server crashes or not?
Sebastián Pillado: Your technical dashboard can be green, but if a button doesn’t react or the interface doesn’t display correctly, the bank is ‘down’ for the customer. Many traditional tools are reactive: by the time they alert you, the failure has already affected thousands of customers. We use ‘digital mystery shoppers’: robots that navigate 24/7 so that if someone has a bad experience, it’s the robot and not the real customer.
This proactive approach is vital. A service outage in banking or insurance can cost between €5,000 and €8,000 per minute. Detecting an incident just 20 minutes before traditional systems do represents massive savings and, above all, prevents a hard-to-repair reputation crisis.
💡Sebastián said…
We use ‘digital mystery shoppers’: robots that navigate 24/7 so that if someone has a bad experience, it’s the robot and not the real customer.
From technical metrics to marketing and business strategy
Historically, monitoring digital channels has been viewed as an IT cost. However, Movizzon’s vision, which resonates deeply with Coinscrap Finance’s data philosophy, is that this information is gold for Marketing and Business departments.
The key lies in the ability to predict the NPS (Net Promoter Score) without burdening the customer with surveys they rarely answer.
Juanjo Gómez: You’ve won awards for predicting NPS without asking the customer. How can you know if someone is happy without asking them?
Sebastián Pillado: “Traditional NPS is subjective and biased; people respond more when they are angry. We translate response times and availability into ‘promoters’ and ‘detractors’ objectively. If a login takes 0.5 seconds, we have a real data point. This allows a CMO to read satisfaction trends by the hour, device, or city, instead of waiting for a monthly report.”
This democratization of technical data allows Marketing to act. If we know exactly where a user gets stuck, we can intervene with a better financial health proposal or simplify a product sign-up process.
The bridge between Latam and Spain: One user, one standard
Movizzon, born in Chile and now present in 17 markets, chose Spain as its gateway to Europe, working with giants like BBVA. Despite regulatory differences like GDPR or DORA, user behavior is strikingly similar on both sides of the Atlantic.
Traditional banking in Spain is undergoing a process of accelerated adaptation, keeping a close eye on neobanks and digital-native fintechs.
Sebastián Pillado: “When you compare traditional banking with native digital players like Nubank or Revolut, the difference is brutal. They have a ‘frictionless’ and agile digital experience in their DNA. Traditional banks are now taking measures to adapt their value proposition to the expectations we all have as modern consumers.”
Conclusion: Data as the engine of financial health
As Head of Marketing at Coinscrap Finance, it is clear to me that optimizing Digital Banking UX is not just about interface design; it is about proactive infrastructure. To provide financial recommendations that change people’s lives, the channel through which they arrive must be flawless. As Sebastián rightly points out, technology must work so that the human doesn’t have to wait. Because in the digital age, trust is measured in seconds.
If you want to keep discovering how digital banking is transforming business management, don’t miss our next LinkedIn Live episode. Follow us!
