Digital transformation of conservative business industries#
If there’s an industry that’s prone to remain stuck using the same processes, technologies, and business models for the longest it has to be banking.
The constant search to reinvent their products and ways to diversify their portfolio of services is often met with resistance to change and conservative practices.
The paradigm of security and digital commodity is one that’s due for stagnation, if it were only driven by the Banks themselves. Queue a new form of disruptive banking businesses: fintechs.
Fintech innovations on traditional banking#
Fintech companies like ebankIT came to be as software providers and digital transformation ambassadors specifically tailored to develop solutions focused on the banking industry, that would appeal to a new market of young and “tech saavy” consumers.
This approach has positioned them as disruptive partner companies, specialized in developing new banking products and services, with a core essence reflected in renovated experiences across multiple banking channels.
The advent of omnichannel products#
Delivering a unified customer experience across multiple channels was key for our clients.
We were looking to depart from a fragmented experience in which each interaction was separately dealt with, isolated from other banking channels, to have as one of the main focus points providing a seamless transaction between devices, even enabling to start an operation on one channel and ending on another.
Having plenty of tech innovations freshly out to market at the time (such as Apple Watch, smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google ) that we were able to get our hands on, allowed us to start exploring and experimenting with these from an early stage.
Creating design experiences to leverage the raw potential of these devices, with little to none documentation and established UI principles, was a testing and learning process that would help me elevate my skillset as a designer building user interfaces for connected experiences.
A product centred on new experiences#
The product offer at ebankIT was diversified to say the least, ranging from Online Banking, Mobile & Wearables, to more experimental approaches such as TV Banking and Google Glass (remember those?), with room for a car app in the middle.
Their offer also contemplated interactive kiosks with touchscreen displays, although those were initially set for failure since they were to be placed in the diminishing numbers of brick and mortar bank agencies.
With the advent of Smartphones and Wearables, as designers we were tasked to explore new ways we could integrate all of the banking offers we catered for at the time, plus innovate on future ways we could bring other consumer products onboard our unified and seamless product.
Working collaboratively with a team of talented designers, always keen to push forward the boundaries of what could lead to a more enticing customer experience, the almost five years I worked with ebankIT were filled with personal and professional growth, and lead to the development of a successful product, used by clients across multiple countries, that endures and is still being actively developed to this day.
Delivering a seamless customer experience across all channels, in a product that needs to be adaptable to the requirements of multiple markets and client specifications was a common goal on our everyday work. Resourcing to live user tests, design experimentation and business analysts, resulted in a modern functional product, that provided a pleasant usage experience, while being easily customisable to the brand requirements and specificities of each client.
