Digital Banking
Digital Banking
From 2017 to 2021, I helped design a digital banking platform for credit unions and other smaller financial institutions. This project started as a quick concept from our client and has since evolved in to a full-fledged product used by at least twenty institutions with over a million combined members.
Stats
Over the past three years credit unions have seen their share of new accounts within the market dropped from 51% to 25%.
Meanwhile digital-only banks have tripled their share from 6% to 18%.
Larger banks share of new accounts grew from 36% to 51%.
My Role
I worked on this project as a designer at Tallwave. I practiced sketching and ideation, collaborating directly with clients and other designers. I helped to create, maintain, and work within a design system. I met directly with product owners on the client side to ask questions and gather requirements.
In addition to design work, I created documentation and that helped to onboard new designers to the project.
Objectives
Target
Credit unions and smaller financial institutions with members who want a modern digital banking experience
Requirements
Needs to be re-brandable, and support the features users come to expect with digital banking, including a complete mobile experience
Competition
Companies building similar platforms, as well as digital-only banks and larger financial institutions with their own digital banking platforms.
According to FIS Global, one in five users started using a new bank during the pandemic. 37% chose to go with a larger institution.
Hypothesis
By providing a modern and engaging digital banking experience, our client’s customers would be able to gain new members and keep current ones that otherwise might have become members with larger institutions.
Design Process
Our process was crucial in designing a better banking experience for our client’s customers. We utilized competitor research, industry experts, demographic research, and eventually user testing to gain user perspective. We collaborated directly with the client to ideate our approach to banking platform features. This process has been applied to new features through out the course of this project.
Our Priorities
A pool of competitor research and input from industry experts helped to inform a roadmap of essential banking features.
Just because a credit union may have less members than a larger bank, doesn’t mean that their members shouldn’t have access to the same digital banking features provided by larger institutions such as the ability monitor Financial Health.
Gaining Perspective
In order to gain user perspective, we used demographic research to build user personas.
Workshops were conducted to build empathy for potential users and contextualize Financial Health through the eyes of different people at different stages of their lives with inherently different priorities and goals. These perspectives shaped our approach to designing features, such as Savings Goals, through creating scenarios such as saving for a trip or vacation.
Ideation
Iterative sketching sessions were conducted to generate ideas.
Members of the team, including product owners on the client side, participated in sketching workshops based around certain features, such as Savings Goals. Each iteration consisted of a prompt, and around thirty minutes of sketching out any and all ideas that applied. Workshops contained multiple iteration sessions, with later sessions in a workshop focused on re-visiting and updating ideas from earlier sessions.
At the end of the workshop, participants placed drafting dots on the sketches and ideas that they thought were the strongest. All sketches would be compiled, but the ones with more votes were set aside and assessed for consistent themes such as setting up a Savings Goal using a “wizard” with pre-filled amounts based on what the user is saving for.
Mockups
Refined sketches and and annotated wireframes preceded high fidelity mobile and desktop mockups.
The strongest ideas from workshops were used as the basis for refined sketches. These sketches were then digitally wireframed and annotated to describe interaction behaviors. High fidelity mockups were produced using existing elements from our UI Kit. If new interface elements were required, these new components would be added to the UI Kit. As the design progressed from feature to feature, our UI Kit evolved in to a full design system.
A Better Banking Experience
Our client needed a better banking experience for their customers to rival platforms provided by larger institutions.
We created a banking platform with an emphasis on financial health that includes personalized recommendations for next steps based on the member’s banking activity to keep members engaged.
Business Banking
Business banking provides the same experience as retail banking with additional features such as managing multiple users and submitting payroll through Automated Clearing House (ACH).
Automated Clearing House
Business banking users can easily schedule and approve ACH files such as payroll or vendor payments through their desktop or mobile applications. Mobile ACH was an industry first.
Content Management
The client needed a robust admin platform that would let institutions control their content.
Using the same patterns we established for the retail banking application, we designed an admin platform that allows institutions’ employees to adjust digital banking settings, communicate with members, as well as manage the content on their banking platform.
Support Messages
Members and support representatives can communicate through an intuitive support message platform. Admins can easily track and assign messages to the appropriate representatives to insure a better support experience for members.
Mobile Adaptation
According to a Statista survey in 2017, 48% of individuals between the age of 18-24 used mobile banking at least once a week.
We designed a platform that wasn’t just responsive, but adaptive, with a mobile-first mentality. If you can do it on the desktop application then you should be able to do it on the mobile web site or the native mobile application.
Brandability
A well engineered design file enabled our client to quickly demonstrate the platform to their potential clients, using re-branded mockups.
Font families, color palettes, logos, and other brand assets could be quickly swapped to rebrand the platform quickly. This same design file could then used to generate all the iOS and Android assets for native applications when our client had successfully closed a deal with an institution.
Outcomes
Our work has created better experiences for members at financial institutions, and has transformed our client’s vision from a sketch to a lucrative business with over 20 client institutions with a combined 1.25 million users.
App store reviews for these apps have been highly positive. By putting design at the forefront of our client’s operations we helped them quickly establish themselves as a leader in providing better banking experiences for a previously underserved market segment.
Next Steps
Infrastructure has been put in to place to gather feedback, both negative and positive, from app users in order to improve features with design updates. These updates can be pushed automatically to all of the client’s customer’s members at once.
Statistics such as an increase in members or increase in account openings will be used to determine if these updates are contributing to an institution’s overall success.
What I Learned
Communicate Early and Often
While working in agile sprint cycles it was important to communicate often and get feedback as early as possible, even if that’s just through sketches.
Familiarity is Important
While trying to keep parity with other banking platforms it was important to stick with patterns that users were already familiar with. This also applied to keeping patterns and jargon that made sense to banking admins and business users.
Keep Iterating
Most of the time the first attempt isn’t the best. This applied to things such as our original layout and navigation structure, individual feature designs, as well as this portfolio page.