Transforming Banking

In 2018 I acted as Design Director on behalf of a retail bank in Ireland to help them ideate solutions for a defined target audience all delivered through existing technical solutions provided by their existing technical partner.

Customer problem

A significant proportion of young people in Ireland are struggling to get a financial foothold. The need to save to buy a house conflicts with existing high costs of living and a desire to still enjoy life by socialising with friends and family and travelling. It’s created a vicious circle, whereby young people see no real opportunity and value to saving and as such, often save no money at all.

The opportunity

Our job was to identify ways in which we could help young people simplify the action of saving and do it in a way that helped make it achievable and rewarding.

Project background

Our client had already identified a target customer segment and were able to provide us with primary research from which we could base our ideas. In addition, our client had a technical partner in Temenos, providing us with an entire marketplace of tools and services from which we could design and build bespoke solutions.

Our process

Utilising the research provided by our client, we quickly created a number of feature ideas and demonstrated these in the form of user journey flow diagrams, visual concepts and technical demos. This led to an initial hypothesis for a product that was then taken into an 8 week proof of concept process. With a fully working prototype, we conducted user testing and also ran a collaborative design workshop with the user testing respondents to further develop and refine our product.

Our solution

At the heart of our solution was a Facebook Messenger BOT that does the hard work for our young customers. With the customers permission the BOT makes a secure connection to any number of their bank accounts, monitors activity and begins saving affordable amounts of money in a new standalone savings account. The rate and manner in which the BOT saves can be customised at any time. The solution is designed to leverage PSD2 and the availability of bank API’s that allow banking customers to make their data available to other third party tools and services. By delivering the service as a BOT, we were able to introduce a conversational style that led the customer through the experience, making it easy and even fun. We focused on layering in functionality, allowing the user to achieve small goals first, thereby proving the value of the service, followed by more enhanced features.

Business value

Our client was able to break the mould of traditional banking by creating a product that directly addresses a pain point. The customers we spoke to expressed what a refreshing and potentially life changing product this could be and expressed how it had helped changed their perception of the banking brand behind the product.

Technology

The opportunity to work with this client arose out of our partnership with Temenos. Key to our success was being able to propose a customer centric product that could be underpinned by Temenos and Temenos Marketplace technology. This required time to get to know the products and the ability to ask the right questions to understand how products could work together seamlessly and on the Facebook Messenger platform.