User Perception of Mobile Banking: Application of Sentiment Analysis and Topic Modelling Approaches to Online Reviews

The digital revolution has led to significant changes in the global as well as Indian banking sector. The introduction of mobile banking apps has provided increased convenience to customers, who can now avail various banking services remotely. Thus, it is imperative to study the customers’ sentiments regarding these applications and find scope for improvement, so that customers can seamlessly operate their bank accounts without having to visit bank branches. Thus, the primary purpose of this research is to study the perceptions of customers towards mobile applications of six major banks in India. A sample of 3000 reviews left by users of these apps was scraped from Google Play Store and sentiment analysis was conducted using RoBERTa-base model from the Transformers library. This was followed by topic modeling using Latent Dirichlet Allocation to find the aspects that are most important to the users. Results revealed that user experience is majorly driven by customer support service, features and functionality of apps, and app performance. Our findings shall help banks identify key areas of improvement so that they can work on enhancing overall customer experience. Despite the growing popularity of mobile banking, this study is the first of its kind in Indian context.