J.D. Power’s 2025 U.S. Banking Mobile App Satisfaction Study named Fifth Third Bank’s mobile app No. 1 in customer satisfaction among all regional banks. A subsidiary of the $212 billion Fifth Third Bancorp, based in Cincinnati, Ohio, the bank designed and built the mobile app from the ground up, and continues to ensure it exceeds expectations by benchmarking it against apps offered by the top banks, neobanks and even outside the banking industry. Pat Saad, Fifth Third’s senior vice president and head of consumer digital, believes that is a key reason why the app has gained such national recognition as a leader among regional banks. “We are literally doing hundreds of updates every year,” he says. “There is almost not a day that goes by that there isn’t a team here at Fifth Third making a change or having a release either that day or that evening.”
Saad recently sat down for an extended interview with FinXTech about the features and functionality that set Fifth Third’s mobile banking app apart and what the bank has in store for the future.
The interview has been edited for brevity, clarity and flow.
FXT: What do you think separates a great mobile banking app from a good one?
Saad: We ground everything in what we call jobs to be done. What are the most important things for a customer on a daily, weekly or even irregular basis? “How do I get paid? How do I pay friends and family? How do I get money in my account? How do I protect myself or protect my assets?” So, whenever we do a large product review, it always starts with the jobs to be done, and that’s sort of what we measure ourselves against. How are we doing right now at solving that job for the customer? That directly influences what we choose to prioritize with our teams, and I think the end result of that is you get better capabilities and experiences for our customers.
FXT: What are some of the features that you’re unlikely to find on other mobile banking apps?
Saad: Our app’s got the ability to seamlessly recognize and transition to dark mode when the customer sets that preference on the actual operating system. I think we’re still one of the only banks to be able to actually do that. The same design system also allows us to do things like “theming.” If you have a particular relationship with us, you might get a different theme, and that happens automatically without anything that the end customer has to do, and also without anything that our teams have to do to make that change possible. So the app’s got some interesting capabilities around design. I think it probably contributed to why we also ranked number one in visual design in that same J.D. Power study.
FXT: What about from a functionality standpoint?
Saad: We’ve done a lot around onboarding. So, as a new customer to the bank, if you’ve opened a new checking account, we have an onboarding experience now that walks you through what we believe to be the five or six most important things you can do to get the most out of the account. And then similarly, we’ve got our new SmartShield capability. It has five or six things we recommend you do to stay safe, and it links you directly into those particular parts of the experience to get that task or job accomplished. One that’s a little bit unique to Fifth Third, this year we did launch a partnership with the company Trust and Will where we’re offering a free will and discounted estate planning.
FXT: Your background isn’t in banking or financial services, but in software engineering for General Electric. Do you feel that gives you an advantage in how you look at building digital products for banking customers?
Saad: I think it does. If you think about building great digital products, you’ve got to have this strong partnership between product and engineering. And having come from an engineering background, I think it does help me lead a product team that has a lot of empathy and respect for our engineering counterparts. And you kind of see that come to life, not just in daily execution or prioritization of work — but our product owners, our product managers — they’re along for every step of the journey. So, you’ve got this really strong partnership right now between the two functions. I like to think I played a part in that, just having come from previous backgrounds where I had a lot of understanding of what it’s like to be in some of those roles myself.
FXT: For Bank Director’s 2025 Technology Survey, we asked respondents to identify their greatest competitive threats. Sixty percent said other local banks or credit unions, while only 40% said neobanks that attract consumer deposits such as Chime. Given that most people are banking on an app, do traditional financial institutions need to put more focus on neobanks?
Saad: We certainly benchmark against our direct peers and the top 10 banks in the country. We also benchmark against the fintechs and nonbanks or other companies not in financial services, especially when we’re talking about things like mobile experiences.
If you really want to build a best-in-class experience, you have to look a little bit more broadly at what others are doing to see how you can incorporate that back into your own experiences, because our customers aren’t just using their banking app on their devices. They’re using 50 to 100 different apps from all different types of companies that you might be able to learn something from. So, we always benchmark against Chime and others whenever we’re doing any kind of comparison around new features or things that we can learn or tinker with ourselves.
FXT: Is that especially important when you’re talking about Gen Z?
Saad: It is. They’re definitely more digitally native. I think all the studies show that. So, you’ve got to meet them where they are. And you have to anticipate and expect that they are digitally native and using many different apps on their devices or services to accomplish any number of jobs related or unrelated to financial services.
FXT: Are there any major areas of innovation you anticipate venturing into with the app in the near future?
Saad: We’re just in the process of launching some new capabilities around planning, around giving customers more insights into budgeting, cash flow, spend analysis, money in, money out every month. That’s an area that we really haven’t invested in much. The other thing that we’re working on right now is trying to innovate around the mobile app, its interface and the interactions with Jeanie, our virtual AI financial assistant. We’re hoping to bring some things to life next year that help customers find what they’re looking for faster, knowing just how dependent folks are on being able to type and find an answer.
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