smartUX

The Challenge

Over the years, technology and the ability to deliver unique value disrupted many industries. From Uber with taxis, Netflix with entertainment, and Apple with music. As financial institutions, we are vulnerable to the same disruptive forces and non-traditional players. For example, we see Paypal, Square, Apple innovating and gaining momentum in payments. A recent survey even revealed consumers willing to bank with the likes of Costco or Apple. Many startups have begun to creatively disaggregated traditional financial offerings and creating new business models. How did the big banks respond? By spending billions. What happens when you are not a big bank with big budgets? How might we use technology to disrupt ourselves?

The Research

Our research into prospect behaviour with the interactions with financial institutions' digital channels revealed that they were not engaged. Why? While the digital content had a great deal of content, customers and prospects were not consuming it. These digital channels' aesthetics were dated and unattractive compared to big tech. At the same time, consumer expectations continue to rise on modern user experiences. Another finding revealed that financial institutions' products and services were traditionally complicated to sell and required human interaction. In contrast, non-traditional players created products and services that were optimized to sell digitally.

Insight

In the face of disruption by non-traditional players, our Financial institutions need to:

1. Offer the best-in-class digital experiences that drive their customers to their lower cost to serve digital channels to meet today's busy lifestyle needs.

2. Be nimble and accelerate build, buy, or partner decisions so that they can deliver customer value at speed.

3. Augment legacy banking core systems that can support increased security safeguards and modern experiences, and unique customer value.
   

smartUX Strategy

By focusing on enriching the experience layer first, the customers and prospects were benefited immediately. This focus provided an opportunity for financial institutions to augment legacy systems over time. To exceed the rising expectation of customers and prospects, build an open innovation community to allow our financial institution customers to collaborate and deliver customer value and iterate at speed. Collaboration is a crucial tenet to speed and reducing costs and duplication of effort.

SmartUX became the name and mission of this initiative. It stands for:

Simple - The user experience needs to be easy to use.

Member Focused - The approach is customer-centric.

Agile - This is how we approach software development.

Responsive - Our digital experience is optimized regardless of your device

Transformative - The experience is best in class

Results

This digital banking platform was launched in 2019 and was available to 244 financial institution brands. This platform was the most extensive program that we had ever launched in the history of the company. Digital engagement increased especially selling through mobile and new account openings with prospects. With a new modern technology stack, our financial institution customers could access a community of reputable providers, which enabled our customers to ship and release faster than before. Financial institutions could control their digital experience to meet the rising expectations of their customers.

Skills

Product Management, Agile Software Development, Business Case Development, Mobile Development, Implementation Process development, Usability Testing, Web Analytics, User Experience, Design Thinking, Project Management, Vendor Management, Strategy creation, Customer Development, Collaboration model development, Cross-functional team leadership, and Product Marketing.