Banking Your Way: a people-centred banking initiative
Client
- Bankinter
Industry
- Banking
Skills
- Business design
- Research
- Strategist planning
Team
- 3x Product Designer
Date
- March - July 2022
Shifting from a bank-centric to a user-centric approach
Banking is facing an increasingly complex environment: new players are setting trends, payment methods are evolving, and the economic cycle is changing, which is having an impact on people's saving and consumption habits.
On the other hand, the macro trends of digitalisation and personalisation continue to boom, generating more demanding customers with higher expectations.
Against this backdrop, the need arises for Bankinter's marketing team to innovate around products and services centred on people, focusing on the ecosystem of accounts.
This is where Secuoyas comes in to help Bankinter tackle this challenge.
Researching from the inside out...
We started by conducting research with the project stakeholders in order to understand their context, needs and to identify the main challenges and strengths for innovation.
I think we can do the Apple of banking with Bankinter. We have the talent, the resources, the foundations
Then it was time to listen to people, both Bankinter customers and non-customers, in order to understand their account structure and their way of managing savings and expenses. And finally, to find out about their experience as banking users in order to detect unmet needs.
Key findings from listening to users and the customer
If we focus on users, the knowledge acquired through the surveys and interviews we conducted helped us to understand that there are no common patterns in relation to each person's account structure and that they end up adapting this ecosystem to their specific needs.
At this point, we asked ourselves the necessary questions to validate whether there is a need for centralised account ecosystems to facilitate day-to-day management and better control of finances. We also explored the opportunity to offer products and services customisable to the user according to their usage and time of life.
On the other hand, before thinking about the final proposals, we broadened the vision of the service by taking into account the customer's needs and understanding where the customer was at.
At this point we asked ourselves some questions such as: what are the basic aspects that we need to improve throughout the experience, what is the perception that users have of the bank, what are the strong and weak points that users highlight about the service and the attention they receive, and what are the most important aspects of the service and the attention they receive?
To answer these questions and many others, we began a strategic analysis focusing on the internal aspects of the bank, processes and people.
In this phase, through various sessions and workshops with the client, we work on different dynamics. These included an analysis and benchmarking of the competition, ideation sessions, prioritisation and concept building. The knowledge acquired through these sessions helped us to understand the bank's organisation and why the products and services had been designed in this way. At this point, and thanks to the evidence from the user research, it became clear that a strategic plan for new initiatives needed to be developed.
Mapping discharge processes
For the Bankinter team, attracting and converting users is one of its main objectives. We therefore decided to put ourselves in the users' shoes and map the registration processes for the different products they offer, from accounts, mortgages and loans to investment products. After analysing them, we detected some barriers or inconsistencies that hindered conversion.
The result of this analysis was a new map of business opportunities which would serve to implement a plan for Bankinter's transformation process. Once the path to be followed had been established, the work continued with the improvement of the basic aspects of user experience detected, and finally work continued on the various most innovative proposals and initiatives.
Making the financial sector more humane
In order to bring banking closer to people with a view to improving their daily operations, we proposed a new user experience that would help the bank's retention strategy. We proposed a new product, the pre-mortgage savings account, a savings account that ends up being a pre-approved mortgage.
