STRATEGIC DESIGN FOR THE FUTURE
OF BANKING

Looking to build out the foundations for the next decade of banking, NAB was keen to accelerate their product roadmap and help align multiple teams across their business and commercial partners.

To protect confidential information, I have omitted and altered some of the details in this case study. The information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of NAB or Cognizant.

My role

I led the user experience design of our engagement with NAB, assisting them establish desirability for their product and helping prioritise features based on interviews with their partners and sales directors for institutional bankers and corporate customers.

We conducted multiple workshops and interviews to identify key pain points, understand customer needs and leverage these insights to accelerate their New Payments Platform (NPP) product roadmap for the next 6-24 months.

Customer insights, socialisation and alignment
I collaborated with three product managers, a head of products and a founder to help understand their biggest pain points. Using these insights, we helped the NAB product team and managers make key decisions in prioritising which features would offer the most value first.  We also shared these insights to over five business units within NAB to help align their efforts.

Facilitating a shared understanding
I used a varity of workshops to help NAB and Cognizant manage risk, empathise with customers and identify relationships between customer and business needs. This meant that we could pre-empt and plan for potential obstacles and quickly balance between customer needs and business risk amongst cross-functional teams.

Experience strategy & vision
I utilised an extension of the Double Diamond framework to provide a way forward from an MVP to a sustainable product offering that would be integrated to their existing operational systems and processes.  This helped support their shared vision of becoming a payment market leader for innovation and thought leadership. 

Stakeholder engagement & cross-functional team collaboration
We partnered with and showcased to project managers, architects, functional consultants, business analysts, fraud & change management, commercial partners, NAB business development directors and external vendors across multiple industries.

Design execution & leadership
I overlaid some of the key activities from the Double Diamond over the agile sprints we ran. I executed customer interviews, workshops, personas and got buy-in from presenting to executives, senior stakeholders and NAB business units.

 

Research methods

  • Problem Statement
  • Stakeholder & Customer Interviews
  • Affinity Diagramming
  • Journey Mapping
  • Pre-Mortem Workshops
  • Lean Personas
  • Business Model Canvas
  • Empathy Map Canvas

The challenge

How might we use customer desirability to accelerate the product roadmap?

  1. Defining the product offering in a way that is easily understood by all our teams.
  2. Which customers can we create the most value for first?

Our approach

Applying the Double Diamond Design Framework & Agile SCRUM.

  1. Understanding customer needs
  2. Establishing customer desirability
  3. Validating product prioritisation with customers
  4. Lean personas for team alignment based on customers’ needs
  5. Current & future state journey mapping for service opportunities
  6. Accelerating customer adoption through the Implementation Diamond

Experience design findings

Lack of clarity of customers & their pain points created a low value proposition.

  1. Customer segmentation and list of customers to target lacks clarity.
  2. There is a disconnect between sales, product and technical teams, in terms of information sharing.
  3. There is no collateral for sales that focuses on the use case specific to each customer.
  4. Value proposition does not address customers pain points directly.
  5. There is little to no support from other internal business units such as CX & Marketing. Support from these business units is an integral part of launching any product or service to customers.

Outcome

Accelerated delivery timeline & roadmap powered by customer desirability & team alignment.

Recommendations
+ Continue to focus on customers. Create a criteria for customer segmentation for NPP, where this will allow the ability to enhance and further align the customer personas and produce a prioritised list of customers to target.

+ Continue customer research and interviews for further understanding of customers’ needs, pain points, challenges, business models and validate how we can add value for them.

+ Marketing the value proposition in a way that addresses the customers pain points and business model. Opportunity to use video and tailor pitch decks to customers.

+ Get more support from internal business units such as Sales, Marketing and CX teams.

+ Improve processes, journeys and workflows iteratively.

+ Further analysis needed for onboarding and operations so that the process can be automated. More work needs to be done on the viability view of the Human Centered Design (HCD) thinking lens.
 

Our impact

Continued advisory and recommendation to NPPA industry body for consent management. Involved with implementation phase and foundational work on disputes self-service.

“….awesome work”!
Executive General Manager, NAB Payments

“… I am very pleased with the engagement, as are the team and enjoyed working with Cognizant”
Head of Product, NAB Payments and Cash Management

Following on from the success of our colloboration, Cognizant has been engaged to work on a tactical piece to develop an interim pipeline for corporate partners wishing to migrate to the New Payments Platform.
 

Next steps

Exploring opportunities for automation & self-service.

One significant pain point that came out was the amount of time and effort for their operations to manage disputes. We began a series of contextual inquires to dig deeper. This informed some of the exploratory work to find possible solutions to pursue, with previews below.

Current state to future state

Each day, to manage and handle disputes, the operations team work with six systems and four monitors.

Due to the build up and dependency on legacy systems that required painful manual entry, it was an error prone process that caused bottle necks in resolving disputes. We needed one simple & elegant dashboard to rule them all!

Gaining insights from support to management level of the operations team, the NAB customer experience teams, fraud and external vendors, we explored new user interactions to simplify and expediate the dispute management process. I helped wireframe a white label portal User Interface (UI), conversational design with the latest chatbot technologies and one button app interaction.

SIMPLIFIED ADMINISTRATION DASHBOARD UI

disputes chatbotdisputes chatbot

Now the hard part...using the implementation diamond to navigate through complex systems and competitive landscapes.

How do we go from establishing customer desirability for your minimum viable product (mvp) to an operational reality within complex systems?  By applying systems thinking to foresee and anticipate impacts to the customer experience, we can help shift mvps into sustainable business models.