From post-it to prototype: designing scalable value-driven banking relationships
In a world where personalization drives loyalty, how can banks scale their customer relationships to make every interaction count towards business impact?
by Elizabeth Chai and Matthew Harper
8 mins read
Introduction
During the rapid design thinking workshop at Backbase ENGAGE, we set out to answer this question. Together with the guests at ENGAGE, we reimagined the future of banking—using design thinking to tackle one of the industry’s biggest challenges: creating scalable, value-driven relationships.
How design thinking increases business impact
Rapid design thinking is not just a buzzword; it’s a practical method for understanding a bank's most crucial challenges and turning them into opportunities. With new technologies, such as AI, reshaping the landscape, banks must act quickly and strategically.
Over a single day, we condensed the typical five-day design sprint into a focused workshop to explore business problems, prototype solutions, and test concepts—to ensure business value and stress test the concept to minimize any potential risks.
From insights to innovation
During ENGAGE, the Backbase Design Team took the challenges gathered from guests and created two design concepts, a “Relationship Manager (RM) ally” and “CFO in your pocket.” Both concept prototypes will be available for you to explore using the link and password at the end of this post.
Relationship Manager (RM) ally
High-value bank customers expect relevant and proactive advisory services. Delivering this requires advisors to engage in the right conversations at the right time, maximizing value and fostering deeper relationships that lead to increased product adoption. However, excessive administrative tasks and a lack of consolidated customer insights prevent this proactive approach from being realized by many Relationship Managers (RMs).
Identifying key challenges
From your insights on the ENGAGE floor, three major challenges emerged:
- Difficulty prioritizing clients for optimal ROI
RMs often lack a system for effectively segmenting clients based on profitability, growth potential, and strategic importance, making it challenging to allocate their time strategically on the clients who will deliver the highest return. - Excessive administrative burden hindering relationship building
Up to 60% of RMs' time is spent on non-revenue generating activities, diminishing their capacity to cultivate client relationships, identify new business opportunities, and provide proactive advisory services. Difficulty delivering consistent value in client interactions
RMs find it challenging to personalize client interactions with relevant insights and strategies due to a lack of integrated client data and readily available market intelligence.
From challenge to prototype
Taking these challenges to heart, we introduced the prototype concept of “Relationship Manager (RM) ally.” This smart tool provides a catalyst for using AI capabilities to augment RM staff, while training the LLM where RMs can intervene, using the most complex customer scenarios.
- Proactive and unified insights: Lead proactive customer interactions, with early warning indicators and market insights
- Task distribution and productivity: Deliver a unified client experience that increases return on effort
- Insightful advice: Connect advice to clients’ business strategies and goals
CFO in your pocket
Many banks struggle to offer small business owners or sole traders a banking experience that truly meets their needs, as a small business could range from a tech start-up to a food truck and have a lot of uncertainties.
Even though the bank may have the knowledge to help small businesses, they often don't have the resources to support them. For example, banks have a lot of data on their small business customers transactions, but they may not know how to use it to support them and offer personalized advice. Many banks face challenges in serving this segment profitably.
As small businesses grow so does the bank’s revenue, and profit is further maximized since it is also cheaper to retain a customer than to acquire a new one. There is big business in small business banking, if you have the technology to support you.
Identifying key challenges
From your insights on the ENGAGE floor, three major challenges emerged:
- Customer experiences are still too generic
Customers only receive a personalized experience when they come into the branch or call today. It’s expensive. - Banking relationships should evolve alongside customer needs
Segment of one. We should not ask customers to adapt to the bank. The experience and relationship should evolve. - Foster trust and loyalty with mutually beneficial relationships
Banks are not just products. We want money to enable people to live a better life.
How we built the prototypes
Leveraging Backbase’s Design System and composable nature of the platform, we fast-tracked development with ready-to-use design accelerators. This approach enabled us to test and iterate rapidly without sacrificing depth or quality.
The prototypes’ core principles included:
- Contextualization: Adapting the experience to the user’s current and future needs.
- Behavior reinforcement: Encouraging small, consistent steps toward better financial habits.
Ease of use: Simplifying complex processes with intuitive design and minimal user input.
Experience the process
Watch the session recording and view the slide deck below to discover the process through which the Backbase Design Team went to turn real business challenges into innovation design concepts.
Experience the prototypes
Want to experience both concepts “RM Ally” or “CFO in your pocket” firsthand? Use the buttons below to view the prototypes using the password: Engage2024.
Let’s build the future of banking, together.
Password: Engage2024
