FinMARS: A Mobile App Rating Scale for Finance Apps

Mobile apps increasingly replace face-to-face interactions between financial service providers and their customers. Therefore, it is critical for developers of finance apps to understand users' perception thereof, and to be able to assess the quality of their own app and their competitors' apps. Star ratings as provided by mobile app stores suffer from multiple shortcomings and are not detailed enough to fulfil this purpose. In this work, we thus developed a reliable, objective, multidimensional measure of the quality of mobile finance apps, which includes both generic and domain-specific aspects. We used an iterative approach and expanded on related work in the Health domain, and validated the scale empirically. The resulting app rating scale for finance apps is a reliable, objective measure of app quality, comprised of six subscales and a total of 34 items. It exhibits excellent internal consistency (alpha=.93) and very good interrater reliability (ICC=.74).