A/B Testing for Banking Apps Has Arrived

If you have dreamed about A/B testing for your banking app, wake up. It’s here.

A new company out of Philadelphia called Artisan now allows for on-the-fly — yes, on-the-fly! — A/B app testing. The Artisan tool also lets “the business side” (meaning non-techies) adjust any app element in a WYSIWYG interface. Or in Artisan’s words:

Artisan’s platform allows non-technical customers such as marketers, designers, and product managers to analyze, test, optimize, personalize, and instantly publish changes to native mobile apps without writing code or resubmitting to mobile app stores.

Yesterday, Artisan released a new version of its Mobile Experience Management product that adds a raft of new functionality.

This is app management taken to a whole new level.

Just so we are clear about what we are talking about here, let’s say you want to change the color of that “Check Your Balance” button on your app. Previously, your developer would have to change the color and upload an entirely new version of the app to the iOS app store (and the Google Play store, if you have an Android app). With Artisan, that button’s color can be changed on the fly without requiring the upload of a new version of the app.

And let’s say you want to figure out which color is better for that “Check Your Balance” button — red or blue. You can run an A/B test of those colors on the fly without requiring the upload of a new version of the app to the app store.

Yesterday’s release adds a function called Power Hooks to the MEM product. Essentially, Power Hooks are core app functions that are developed once. Once they are developed, the “non-technical customers” can adjust and A/B test at will. It seems as though before Power Hooks was released, the A/B testing was more limited.

I saw an extensive demo of the application last night and it is robust (and expensive). I was with a group of hardcore iOS developers who were nothing short of wowed by the Artisan demo. One game developer from Slovenia who was sitting next to me whispered, “How do they do this?” The trick here is that Artisan is allowing for these adjustments and A/B testing without requiring the upload of a new version of the app to the app store. The game developer ended up asking the Artisan demo-er, after his presentation, how Artisan works. “I can’t tell you until our patent goes through,” the Artisan rep said.

MapQuest and RueLaLa are among the charter customers of Artisan.

There is a catch. The A/B testing function costs at least $1,000 per month for sites with more than 10,000 monthly active users. Alas, A/B app testing does not come cheap.

Learn more about what’s next in banking at Bank Innovation 2014 on March 3-4 in Seattle. Request an invitation here.