Forrester put the mobile services of 15 major banks from around the world through their paces, judging them on the range of touch-points for access; the enrolment and login process; money management services; transactional features; service features; cross-channel functionality; sales services; and usability.

Out of 100, the banks scored an average of 56 points, with US giant Chase leading the pack on 71. Chase scored particularly well - 86 out of 100 - on transactional functionality, thanks to useful contextual options such as the ability to add a payee for P2P payments by importing the customer's contacts from their phone.

La Caixa is ranked second in the table, scoring 67 points, with an impressive 88 out of 100 in the range-of-touch-points category thanks to native mobile and tablet apps across four operating systems: Android, BlackBerry OS, iOS, and Windows Phone.

In June, La Caixa will host MobeyDay - a mobile banking event organised by Finextra and the Mobey Forum - in Barcelona.

Bank of America and Wells Fargo both score a respectable 63 points, With Citi on 61, Dutch giant Rabobank 59 and Deutsche Postbank 58.

However, UK banks are lagging behind their international colleagues, with NatWest the top ranked Brit on 57 points, ahead of Barclays on 54 and HSBC on a woeful 25 points, a score which takes into account zero out of 100 for transactional features.

On average, the 15 banks score best on offering a range of touch-points (71 out of 100) and account information and management (67) but poorly on service features (34) and sales and acquisition (eight).

Peter Wannemacher, analyst, Forrester, says: "The most obvious missed opportunity among the 15 banks reviewed by Forrester is that few are making effective use of context to make information more relevant to customers. Sales is another big missed opportunity: Some banks aren't even trying to cross-sell products and services through mobile, and none of the 15 does it effectively."