Our role as part of the ‘Originations and Utilities’ programme was to ensure:

• A measurable improvement in the customer experience for global current account applicants.
• The delivery of high quality account opening services that offered clear value to customers.
• A positive cultural shift within the internal design and delivery capabilities.

To make this happen, we established a cross-functional delivery team which included product designers, developers, back-end integration experts, Enterprise Agile delivery leads, and software testers. We embedded a blend of SPARCK’s Design Thinking methodology with BJSS‘ award-winning Enterprise Agile approach which contributed to reducing operational costs, while also increasing efficiency for the delivery teams.

From the outset, we placed positive customer outcomes as the primary indicator of success for the project, instead of process or business outcomes, which allowed us to make sure that every decision made had customers and users at the heart of it.

Designing journeys for financial services presents some unique challenges which we needed to overcome. Our initial research revealed to us that users can be intimidated by the amount of detail required for a successful application. We hypothesised that, as a result of this, users are more likely to abandon the on-boarding journey prematurely.

Our initial research revealed to us that users can be intimidated by the amount of detail required for a successful application.

To counter this, we began by mapping out an ideal user journey and used this to inform the structure of an Axure prototype. Our aim was to provide evidence of users struggling to complete the journey, given the amount of data required from them. This proved invaluable in motivating our clients internal Customer Due Diligence team to review the amount of questions they were expecting users to complete.

We also prototyped and tested a ‘progressive reveal pattern’ which was designed to only reveal certain questions to a user, based on how they answered the preceding questions, thereby reducing the cognitive load placed on each applicant. We also found that by breaking up the question sets into distinct thematic sections (such as, personal, residential, employment, financial and account usage details) also reduced cognitive load for users. This also had a measurably calming effect on users who were then far more inclined to complete the application process.

Soon after our initial research, we quickly pivoted to designing and developing live alpha versions of the service. We used a ‘prototyping sprints’ focused on identifying and addressing technical, integration, usability and accessibility issues well in advance of the final product launch. This also gave us the ability to validate our ideal journey with users at a far higher level of fidelity, and across multiple regions.

We used a ‘prototyping sprints’ focused on identifying and addressing technical, integration, usability and accessibility issues well in advance of the final product launch.

An important consideration for us during the Alpha phase was how the regulatory, legislative, technical and behavioural factors that govern the retail banking industry can be heavily nuanced from one region to another. For example, the requirement to validate a customer in the UK is not nearly as stringent as it is in Hong Kong. To address this, we began to investigate technology solutions that would allow us to perform realtime identity verification using device hardware – a first for the bank.

We also began work on a service that would allow customers to perform a soft-check on their credit history to reveal what sort of account they would be best suited for, prior to undergoing a full account application.