‘Design is a competitive advantage’: How three banks are integrating design into customer experience

Despite all the hype around transformative technologies or the fact that consumers aren’t actually using any “fintech,” the dinosaurs of the financial world are changing from the inside out, putting the customer experience before their business — and design thinking is at the forefront of that.

It’s optimistic, but also just a new way (for banks) of doing business. They’ve realized they no longer dictate how they do business and what they produce; their customers do. In a digital world filled with choice, banks’ customers need choice, empathy and ease of use designed into every interaction they have with the bank — and they need to deliver on that quickly, before their competitors, which now include retailers and other non-banks.

Design thinking is moving bank operations away from “managing” and more toward innovating. For example, banks co-create products with customers in order to integrate their feedback more quickly and more frequently, instead of some far off time when a product s due for an upgrade. They’re deliberately hiring teams with diverse backgrounds to reflect the diverse customers they serve and build solutions with empathy, instead building teams of people with similar backgrounds and strengths. When they build new products, they’re collaborating with other parts of the organization and even with other financial services providers, instead of working independently in silos that don’t communicate with each other, which drags the delivery process at every stage.

“There is no greater trojan horse to change an organization than design thinking,” said Stephen Gates, head of Citi Design. “Especially with something where there are lawyers, regulators… Part of what we had to do was change thinking, not behavior. If it’s new behavior on old thinking, we didn’t really change anything.”

Here are three banks going all in on their design people — finding experts, training non-experts, cultivating internal communities — to make their organizations and customer interactions stronger.

BBVA
Spanish banking giant BBVA is training 1,000 staff ‘ambassadors’ to spread good design practice throughout the organization, Rob Brown, head of marketing, design and responsible business at BBVA, said Thursday at Experience Fighters.

Brown, who BBVA poached from Barclays last year, said the most innovative and exciting products on the market are those created at places that incorporate design in every part of the organization, not just the creative department.

“These companies understand that design is a competitive advantage and that all employees, regardless of their role, should begin to see themselves as a designer that contributes to improving the customer experience,” he said.

BBVA currently has 150 designers in 11 countries, but as part of the design ambassador pilot it will train “up to” 1,000 more from various parts of the organization, by promoting design thinking courses and providing training for the “non-designers” to apply design thinking to their day-to-day work.

“My goal is that our more than 900 projects around the world be undertaken using Design Thinking, and that our professionals have fun doing so,” he said.

USAA
In February USAA unveiled its 120-person design studio in Austin to focus on improving digital experiences among customers and employees.

The bank, historically a leader in financial services innovation — it was one of the first banks to get into mobile check deposit and online banking, for example — sees people and internal culture as the essence of how it design translates to their customers. So it chose Austin, a tech hotbed, for its design community, versus its home base in sleepy San Antonio.

Their goal, like all banks today, is to make financial planning, applying for a mortgage or choosing insurance coverage as easy calling an Uber or one-click buying off Amazon. But the reality of user experience design is often, businesses don’t experience the brand the way customers do and as a result, the work falls short.

“You have to do detailed visibility testing but also understand emotions that bring someone to an experience,” Meriah Garrett, the bank’s chief design officer, told Tearsheet at the time. “If it’s an in-and-out transaction, like trying to make sure you get your bill pay right, it’s all about speed and clarity.”

Appropriateness is the key design principle, she said. “It comes down to how you apply things appropriately… That drives me to why we have to have really good people.”

Citi
In October 2015, Citi launched its FinTech unit to act as a startup inside a bank dedicated to mobile-first solutions for its consumer banking customers. A month before that, Citi’s Gates joined the bank as part of the then 40-person Citi FinTech unit, to lead its in-house design studios as well as external agencies. His team has designed the user experiences for Citi.com’s various updates, the Citi mobile app and worked on the branding and advertising for Citi FinTech, the Citi Innovation Labs and the Citi Global Consumer Bank.

A deal signed that with the design consultant Ideo, in which it would train Citi employees on design thinking, has been a tremendous force in Citi’s innovation strategy, Gates said in January at the Design+Finance conference. The two have been working together to create a version of design thinking with agile methods for innovation that’s unique to Citi. Gates said he hopes his team would take the lead on spreading innovation across Citi.

“[Design thinking] gives everyone permission to come into that process, to participate. So instead of me going to legal and saying ‘will you approve this, yes or no?’ Come be part of the process. And then I can tap into the base thing: people will psychologically support what they’re part of. That was a massive transformation… ‘Creative’ isn’t a department anymore.”

Since then, the demand for the design teams’ work has grown to be the fastest growing team in the consumer bank, he says. He began the transformation by evaluating existing in-house creative talent and then re-establishing standards, culture and structures for the team. He has since hired new leadership and talent and coaches existing talent across different studios.

Inside USAA’s new 120-person Austin design studio

Finance giant USAA is amping up its customer experience focus with a new design studio in Austin to house the 120 people it has focused on improving digital experiences.  The goal is to make financial planning, applying for a mortgage or choosing insurance coverage as easy as ordering up an Uber or buying something off Amazon.

“It’s time to turn up the discipline, the capacity, the way we partner and do the actual work,” said Meriah Garrett, the bank’s chief design officer. “A big part of that is hiring. The Austin market is to really able to scale up at pace… there’s a tremendous local talent pool.”

Among U.S. banks, USAA has a reputation for innovation. It was one of the first banks to get into mobile check deposit and online banking, for instance. It chose to locate its design operations in Austin, a tech hotbed, versus its home base in sleepy San Antonio.

The studio looks like a modern office, but with a lot of collaboration spaces. There are no office cubes, but a lot of stand desks. 

“Designers are a little bit obsessed with vertical working space and being able to ‘externalize,’” Garrett said, whether it comes in the form of work sketches, Post-Its scribbled with research quotes and findings, or marking up work in red pen.

In banking, the focus on design and customers’ digital experiences came recently, with the rise of financial technology and the growth of the mobile channel. Many banks have invested more heavily in design in the last two years – take Chase, which opened new Manhattan headquarters for its digital team almost a year ago – but it can take years to see a real impact, Garrett said.

The reality of user experience design is businesses and executives don’t experience the brand the way customers do and as a result, all this work around customer experience falls short. For example, people in finance treat finance like it’s a well known entity, Garrett said. They know it’s been around for years an years, understand the vehicles, mechanisms and why to choose one account over another.

“In reality, most people are operating their regular lives and finance happens to be a part of it,” she said. “One of the things that has really struck me is how much people are missing the 101. That is a tremendous weight for design practice at USAA, an opportunity to change conversation and emotion we all have about money.”

To drive that conversation, USAA is using new technologies and different types of artificial intelligence, but Garrett said making sure it’s the right conversation often comes down to the designers and team members themselves – the humans behind the products.

The bank doesn’t have a universal measurement for impact, Garrett said, and that’s something that’s challenging the whole industry. She sees it as an opportunity to really identify or detail a given customer experience in a way that gives insight and understanding to the designers. She also said she tries to avoid hard measures like numbers or clicks.

“You have to do detailed visibility testing but also understand emotions that bring someone to an experience. If it’s an in-and-out transaction, like trying to make sure you get your bill pay right, it’s all about speed and clarity,” she said.

Appropriateness is the key design principle.

“It comes down to how you apply things appropriately… That drives me to why we have to have really good people. What keeps me up right now is hiring – hiring quality and pace and making sure we grow the right talent at USAA in order to be able to fulfill on this vision.”

Chase infuses these 4 key design components into all its products

More often that not, top professionals running design and marketing in financial firms look more comfortable in jeans and a black shirt than they do in a three-piece.

As customers expect more from their banking apps, the industry has looked outside for fresh talent. These people bring with them experiences from ecommerce, media firms, and advertising agencies that are crucial for success in developing consumer-facing technologies.

“Bringing in people with fresh perspectives from outside has been very valuable for us,” said Josh Klenert, executive director of user experience and design at Chase. “Different backgrounds give a fresh perspective. We don’t just compare ourselves to others in the financial industry — we’re competing against any other app that a user has on his or her mobile device.”

This outside perspective has helped Klenert lead brands through big changes. Because UX designers place the customer at the center of their work, being an outsider forces them to ask questions and to challenge the status quo. Being new to an industry requires an empathy that drives user-centric design, peeling back an issue to frequently find a simpler solution.

Chase's Josh Klenert on design
Chase’s Josh Klenert in the firm’s San Francisco office

Klenert understands well the technology transition the financial industry is going through, because he’s one of those fresh implants. With stints at Billboard, iheartradio, and The Huffington Post, the designer has frequently found himself in industries and firms that are undertaking large transformation processes. Based in Chase’s San Francisco office, Klenert leads a division that uniquely cuts across all of JPMorgan Chase’s brands with content and design.

To work across divisions and brands, Chase created the Digital Customer Experience (dCE) team, a design organization lead by Tim Parsey with a set of principles that define its design philosophy. This document affords Klenert and his team an easy way to explain its perspective when it begins a new project.

Simple

 

Chase's simplified bill pay
Simplifying Chase’s bill pay

Chase believes in creating the simplest experience possible. One area this shows through is the recent redesign of the consumer online experience at Chase.com, simplifying the dashboard so that payments and accounts are all on the same screen, requiring fewer clicks for customers to pay bills.

Chase also recently simplified its payment app, QuickPay, adding modern touches like photos of friends and cutting down on the number of screens users need to jump through.

Personal

The dCE team at Chase tries to personalize technology experiences. For example, Chase users will see different topography on screen on the homepage depending on where they’re located and what time of day they access their machine.

“If you’re in San Francisco, you’ll see San Francisco,” said Klenert. “We’re adding humanity to the experience.”

Human

 

Chase's new mobile apps
Chase’s mobile experience

It’s here that Klenert makes use of his background in storytelling. He’s employing a friendlier, conversational tone and language in technology and messaging. Chase is trying to do away with the kind of lifeless, generic bankerspeak we’ve all become accustomed to receiving from our financial institutions. That includes meaningless technology terms as well, so in place of a login/logout button, it’s now sign in and sign out.

Cohesive

Chase’s dCE team is trying to create a cohesive experience that’s familiar across the firm’s brands and touchpoints. The designers are working towards a consistent topography and iconography across all its experiences, including at ATMs, which now also leverage local topography.

Every step of the way, Klenert and team incorporate user testing into their processes. Different projects have different scope and scale and the user testing process typically reflects that.  Chase also tries to get users involved earlier in a project — sometimes before an idea is even half baked.

“We’ll share concepts and even pencil sketches, to get user feedback early on to help shape the product,” Klenert said. “We believe we’re transforming how our customers are using digital products. It’s amazing to have the scale to get feedback from 65 million people.”

How financial services got religion on design

design in the financial services industry

by Yuyu Chen

With the rise of fintech startups comes a re-invigorated interest in design at traditionally staid financial services and management consulting businesses.

The dovetailing of design with finance and consulting is evidenced in recent mergers and acquisitions: Venture capital KPCB’s 2016 #DesignInTech report shows that 42 design firms have been acquired since 2004; half of which were done in the last year alone. For example, Capital One purchased design studio Monsoon, and BBVA acquired user-experience firm Spring Studio in 2015. And this year, Capgemini bought design consultancy Fahrenheit 212.

KPCB’s 2016 #DesignInTech report

The job market also reflects the trend as agencies are having a hard time hiring designers. “I’m not sure why this has been accelerating recently in financial services, though design seems to be a natural extension to management consulting, an industry that is often criticized for prizing strategy over execution,” said Sam Becker, creative director for Brand Union, adding that design is a logical expression of consulting strategies.

Traditional banks are under attack from specialist startups — like Venmo, Betterment and wealthfront — that were born with a better product experience in mind. “Larger organizations are realizing they are vulnerable to disruption by smaller, leaner startups,” said Stephen Olmstead, vp of strategic partnerships for product-design firm InVision. “Design is the DNA of [digital disruption]. Industries like finance are proactively thwarting that disruption and attempting to maintain dominance by heavily investing in design infrastructure.”

For the money-management firm TIAA, design is at the core of its plan to re-invent the brand for the digital, mobile age. The company has been building an internal user-experience team of around 50 people over the past five years.

“We have been trying to transform from a retirement service provider to a diversified financial intuition over the past 15 years. When we decided to rebrand this year, we realized that we needed a fundamental rethink of our digital assets to educate people on our brand,” said Jaime Punishill, head of brand strategy and integrated marketing for TIAA.

With a “design-thinking customer-centric approach,” TIAA relaunched its website in February of this year, rebuilt its content-management system and added personalization capabilities so the new website can serve customized content for different demographics. For example, a 75-year-old visitor and a 25-year-old visitor will see two different pieces of budgeting advice on the site.

As of June, site traffic was up 40 percent and click-through rate increased by 800 percent year-over-year, according to Punishill. “Design supports our brand awareness and marketing goals. We look more like a fintech startup now,” he said.

While TIAA plans to beef up its design capabilities through direct hires rather than acquisitions, there is a broader trend of absorbing design firms and building talent pools to support those capabilities, according to Tom Puthiyamadam, global leader for PwC’s digital services.

Still, one common mistake that many corporations are making is that they put their new digital teams or creative talent into silos. “We need to take an ‘everyone at the table’ approach,” he said.

“It’s not about the digital products a legacy financial services or management consultant can all of a sudden provide. It’s about the business, financial, management acumen that the firm brings to the table, to drive the creative design and development of a digital solution.”

This article originally appeared on Digiday.

Photo credit: hanspoldoja via Visualhunt / CC BY