Fintech R&R☕️ - Getting to the cr-UX of building great banking experiences
A primer on Customer Experience, the challenges of building UX in banks, 3 pillars of great UX, I, Robot's relevance to UX, the evolution of fintech UX
Hey Fintechers and Fintech newbies 👋🏽
A couple of weeks ago, I hosted a webinar for Marqeta titled “UX showdown who’s winning the battle for customer experience supremacy” (full video here).
It was a great free-flowing conversation with the panellists Hannah and Mark where we talked about the basics of UX, the differences between banks and fintechs, examples of our favourite examples of fintech UX, and a bit about AI.
As I was performing a bit of a hybrid moderator/panellist role, I didn’t manage to get into all the points rattling around my head as I wanted to make sure the panellists had the time and space to get their experienced viewpoints across.
Some areas I didn’t have time to get to were things like the reasons banking CX is a bit more generic, the clear difference between CX and UI, the broad nature of the CX umbrella and the impact of Consumer Duty on CX going forward.
The other trigger for this week’s article was Monzo’s new home screen design, which they are gradually rolling out and gives customers, including myself, the option to switch to the new configurable layout. The major visual change divided some in the Monzo community, as expected, but changes to accommodate a growing product usually turn out to be fruitful in the long run.
I also wanted to cover some positive Monzo news as the bashing has continued with another politician unfamiliar with the true meaning of ‘de-banking’ jumping on the ‘Monzo rejected me’ bandwagon. I won’t give them too much airtime, but I will say this was a recent Prime Minister who was outlasted by a lettuce.
Anyway.
Based on this intro (excluding the lettuce reference), you’ve probably gathered that I dive into Customer and User Experience in this week’s article.
As well as interesting news, puns + movie references this edition includes the following:
An overview of CX
The difference between CX, UX and UI
I, Robot and it’s relevance in a CX newsletter
Three Foundational pillars of great UX
Challenges of banking UX transformation
The challenges fintechs will face in the coming years
UX IS DEAD. LONG LIVE CX 💪🏽
The ‘User Experience’ label can be confusing, with some using the UX label exclusively, some interchanging between UX & CX, and some even mixing up User Experience with an app’s User Interface.
Let’s start by clearing some of this up.
While many (including me) started out using the term User Experience to describe all the various interactions between the end user and the product/app, Customer Experience is the umbrella term of choice that encompasses all customer interactions from the website and out-of-home experiences to in-app designs and journeys and everything in between.
And the move to using CX as the all-encompassing term is obvious when you think about it.
The term ‘User’ immediately establishes the relationship between the company and their target audience as transactional rather than experiential. ‘Users’ feels like a term for numbers on a spreadsheet or mindless zombies clicking buttons on an app rather than real people using a product or service to solve their problems. ‘Customers’ and Customer Experience are terms much more representative of the language companies should use internally and externally to talk about their audience.
Overall, the use of ‘Customer’ rather than ‘User’ fosters a more positive, customer-centric approach to things like personas, feedback, marketing and support rather than a blanket unempathetic approach. It also creates alignment with existing customer-centric teams such as Customer Success/Support and Customer Insights/Analytics and a broader empathy and understanding of the customer, their problems, and the value the product or service brings.
NOTE: There are still some long-established phrases where the term ‘User’ is still actively used
CX Appeal 🎨
I’ve touched on CX and what it is, but let’s give it and some other terms the ‘succinct one-liner’ treatment.
Customer Experience (CX)
Term that describes customers’ complete experience and all touchpoints with the organisation and brand, including in-person, online and in-app.
CX Role: A CX professional’s focus, whether they are Head of Experience, Chief Marketing Officer or otherwise, is to create a positive and seamless experience that attracts, engages, and delights customers, reviews and improves interactions, and ensures alignment between the business goals and the customers needs.
User Experience (UX)
Term that describes customers’ experience with the organisation’s product or service, in the case of digital banks, the complete experience with the mobile or web app.
UX Role: A UX professional’s focus, whether they are a Designer, Head of UX, Product Designer or otherwise, is to create a low-friction and seamless product experience that’s brand-aligned, fun and easy to use and solves vital problems for customers.
User Interface (UI)
Term that describes the interface between the customer and the organisation’s product, which in mobile and web apps are the individual pages containing buttons, input boxes, text and imagery.
UI Role: A UI professional’s focus, whether they’re a hybrid UI/UX designer, UI designer or otherwise, is to use the existing brand look & feel to build an interface between the customer and product and assist the customer in completing specific goals at each stage of the journey.
UI, Robot
For new readers, of which there are quite a few this fortnight, you might not be aware that I’m a fan of analogies and movies. When bringing some clarity to a subject, using familiar pop culture references accelerates understanding. That’s my view at least. This week, I’m using the popular AI movie based on Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ series, I, Robot, to further highlight the differences between CX, UX and UI.
Customer Experience level - USR
In the movie, U.S Robotics, or USR, is the world’s leading AI and robotics development company. Its CX at a brand level and across all aspects of its organisation (transport, military, health, homecare) is designed to reflect its values as a safe and trusted authority, expertise in leading technology and a supportive organisation for all people. This is reflected in all interactions with customers in all aspects.
User Experience Level - Personal Service Robots
At a product and UX level, the best example is USR’s personal service robots, the film’s main focus. The UX of the personal service robots overlaps with the organisations’ CX, with more of a focus on trust and friendly and supportive interactions with customers. The robots are part of the organisation, but each product line has its own UX approach and principles, including the robotics division.
User Interface Level - NS-4 Model vs NS-5 Model
UI level is much more granular, with it coming down to the different skins and looks of each NS model. Although there were technical differences between the NS-4 and NS-5, such as the strength and durability of the robots themselves, their interfaces were also improved to make them more human-like and easier to interact with.
That clarifies the common confusion between CX, UX and UI. I’ve also mocked up a visual overview of CX to highlight its breadth and give more transparency about where UX and UI fit in.
And excuse the slightly clickbait header of ‘UX is dead..’. UX isn’t dead, and neither are the crucial roles of UX Designer, UX Researcher, and Head of UX. They are very much alive and kicking and required to keep end-to-end User Experiences and journeys up to date, in line with customer habits and aligned with overall organisational strategy.
So it’s not UX that’s dead. But instead, the use of the term UX to describe every customer touchpoint with the brand.
That’s just one of the points I didn’t have time to cover in detail during the webinar.
The Foundations of Great UX
We’re back into UX (if you’ve already forgotten the difference between CX, UX, and UI, have a quick scan of the definitions above).
Another point on my list of UX topics was the foundations of great UX. How I like to look at it is the things that, if they were absent, would make it a lot harder to build great UX for a digital platform.
So, what are the key foundations of great UX?
As Sonny from I, Robot says, “That is the right question”.
Product Vision & Strategy 🔭
A clear vision and robust strategy for the product are vital in delivering great UX.
Why?
Without a clear vision of the product, including clarity over the customers it will serve, the problems it will solve and the overall net benefit it will bring, it’s difficult to build great UX because there are too many unknowns to factor into the product’s user experience.
For example, without clarity on the customer demographic, it’s challenging to create the proper phrasing and strike the right tone & language when asking customers for information or helping them with questions.
Without a clear understanding of the market and the product’s differentiating features, it’s challenging to build a UX that either uses existing common practices used by competition and, therefore, understood by customers or to build an intentionally differing and unique experience entirely.
And without a long-term view of the product’s strategy and growth, it’s very tough to build UX that can slowly evolve as the product grows with the capacity to change without being too disruptive and jarring for the customer.
As a product professional, I’ve spelt out the importance of product vision & strategy on countless occasions, but it’s sometimes underplayed how important it is in building great UX and, therefore, great UI.
Brand Strategy 🍟
Another foundational block of great UX. And it’s kind of obvious when you think about it. UX isn’t about getting the customer through a set of journeys as fast as possible. If that was the case, most apps would look exactly the same.
It’s about guiding them through a process, creating surprise and delight moments, and ensuring the product is usable, accessible, and consistent, from landing on the product’s website to creating an account.
Brand is central to this.
Clear branding guidelines, a logo that reflects the organisation, a language book (using mission-led words consistently to get a message across), a fully-fledged brand book with colour schemes, and a distinct font and style all feed into creating great UX for the customer base.
In an earlier edition of Fintech R&R covering Wise’s progress, I said, “Product and Brand go hand in hand”. A catchy rhyme that’s also accurate, which is my perfect combo for a headline.
The same applies to UX and Brand. Using the brand to create an affinity with the organisation and its offering can help make that great end-to-end experience.
The obvious example is using a colour scheme, and here’s a little experiment I put together to show the great work some companies have done to make their brand stand out and help support great UX.
Guess each consumer fintech just from their stand out colour alone. Scroll to the bottom for the answers and kudos if you get all five.
The Right Expertise 🤓
Of the three key pillars, this is the most overlooked. The importance of the other two is often underplayed, but this is the one overlooked the most. Only because important roles like UX designer, UX researcher and customer researcher are often not created as independent roles, and I often see them absorbed as part of someone else’s responsibility, like a product manager or designer, rather than seeing it as its own dedicated position.
Dedicated people such as UX & UI designers, experienced front-end engineers and UX researchers are foundational because of their expertise in researching customer trends, understanding competitor journeys, implementing best practices, understanding accessibility rules, and their experience in designing & building great UX.
Subcontracting these key responsibilities to Product Managers/Product Leads, which I’ve seen and heard done before, is risky. Although getting the person or team who builds the product strategy to create the UX is convenient, it’s not efficient or effective. ‘Best of breed’ is a phrase used when looking at a tech stack, and it should also be used when thinking about structuring a team to create the best UX.
Why Transforming Bank UX is an elite level acheivement
One final point that I touched on during the webinar was about banks. As it was a UX showdown, it was through a ‘Banks v Fintech’ lens, and I mentioned that banks, in my humble and informed opinion, get a tough time regarding their UX. There are legitimate reasons that mean keeping their in-app and end-to-end product experiences up to date and relevant to their customer base is challenging.
I’ve worked for, and with banks throughout my career, so I want to highlight why it’s a bit more challenging for banks to create great in-app and end-to-end product experiences compared to a complete greenfield project or evolution of a startup/scaleup UX.
These aren’t excuses but more caveats to consider and maybe include before rushing to slate a bank's new UX.
1️⃣ Frankenstein tech stack
Traditional banking firms often have a long and winding road to their current position. Barclays Bank, for example, is made up of part of Lehman’s failed Investment banking division + ING Direct UK + The Woolwich (an old British Building Society) + Banco Zaragozano (a Spanish bank), to name just a few. This means tech from these companies (some of which would have been the driver for acquiring the company in the first place) has also been integrated into the bank, and having multiple technologies that do essentially the same thing makes it tough to build a clear and seamless UX as it’s often not best of breed tech that’s being utilised. That’s why transformation projects still exist…
2️⃣ Broad customer base
I’ve spoken about the importance of understanding the customer base when building great products, and UX is core to that. The issue that banks have is that they are working with 100s of different personas across millions of customers, and building a UX for such a broad base is no mean feat. New digital propositions are successful because they identify problems for specific customer niches, establish the best way to solve those problems, build a product that fits a small set of customer personas, and then evolve the product over time. It’s tough for banks to do that because it involves creating a standardised UX for a broad customer base and making it engaging and distinct. It’s a thankless task, so I’ll sympathise with a rather plain and static bank UX if it successfully serves over 20 million customers.
3️⃣ Transitioning through multiple technological eras
The majority of these big banks were established before the 1980s when the age of the computer (or Information Age) really started to come to life. This means that most banks started out with very ‘basic’ technology (mainframes and COBOL applications), and then when tech started to make bigger leaps, they became stale very quickly. Acquisitions of other firms and the passage of time means the tech tends to fall behind the prevailing trend. It means that most big banks have been playing catch up for a while, and many of them still have big programs of work on the slate (some ongoing) to bring their tech stack into the 21st century and allow them to build faster.
4️⃣ Breadth of Product Offering
By the time traditional banks started transforming from fully physical to digital experiences, they were already offering current accounts, savings accounts, investments, mortgages, loans, insurance, and pensions. And that’s just on the consumer side. When experiences were physical and in-person, you’d have a different set of forms for each type of product, and then banks had to shift these origination points and onboarding processes into digital experiences whilst still maintaining the in-person process during the transition. Difficult at the best of times, but when you consider the breadth of products, as mentioned above, and consider that each of these products is likely powered by its own unique mix of backend technology, then you begin to understand the difficulty of building a seamless digital experience that sits on top of all these products and underlying tech.
Monzo's change and the evolution of Fintech UX
The Breadth of Product Offering section is an excellent segway into the last section of this week’s Fintech R&R and a circle back to Monzo’s new home screen.
Banks have had no choice but to ensure all (or most) of the products they had available when interacting with customers face-to-face are now available via digital channels.
While an initially broad product offering is a tough challenge for banks, evolving from a narrow product offering to a broader one is challenging for fintechs.
Most fintechs have built their digital-first platforms for an initially niche customer segment with a narrow offering. Either focusing just on current accounts, savings products, or loans, sometimes even narrowing offerings within these verticals.
As their offering broadens, adding more products to their stack, and their customer base also widens–I’ve now seen my fair share of over 50-year-olds, which proves to me Monzo has long since moved away from the card for ‘Millennials who work in tech near Old Street–products in-app experience has evolved, hence the changes.
Changes to its UI are inevitable, and this isn’t the first change it’s made to its look and feel.
But the challenge isn’t “how to change the UI to cater for the growing products it offers”.
The challenge is, “how to change the UI to cater for the growing set of products while still keeping the experience seamless and distinctly Monzo and not falling into the trap of creating an off-the-shelf white labelled bank app”.
It’s not just a Monzo challenge. It’s a challenge for many fintechs looking to scale, broaden their offerings and increase their customer base to ultimately increase revenue.
And to do that, it’s not just about designing a great in-app journey or building interactive and informative screens. It’s about the broader CX, aligned with company values, that shapes the customers’ understanding of the organisation and its products. From on-the-ground campaigns, online community boards, direct communication with the customer of changes associated with their product (like fee changes), transparency over mistakes, and clarity over the product roadmap, all of which can be delivered in different ways to make the CX distinct.
Shifting the UX and UI to accommodate a greater offering while staying aligned with broader CX is a huge challenge but one that many fintechs will face over the next couple of years and hopefully successfully overcome.
I’m hoping it means we continue to see innovative and distinct experiences rather than a sea of bland-looking, white-background, identical apps with generic AI-powered communications and marketing material.
To Be Continued…
Answers to the UX game: Wise, Monzo, Klarna, Starling, Monese
Interesting Fintech News
JP Morgan rolls out iPhone Tap to pay - JPM is rolling out the ability for merchants to take payments from customers using only an iPhone, removing the need for clunky, static payment terminals. Its first customer is the beauty brand Sephora. There are many great use cases for tap-to-pay, including in-seat experiences at stadiums, up-market cinemas, and personal shopping experiences. Could this end the huge ‘PAY HERE!’ signs at department stores?
India’s Central Bank is building open credit rails - The Reserve Bank of India announced that they’re planning to build open tech infrastructure to “enable the delivery of frictionless credit by facilitating seamless flow of required digital information to lenders,”. Very timely news, given the deep dive into UPI a few weeks ago and last week’s reference to the lack of Credit info on UK Open Banking rails. For me, this is another signal that India will be the next big fintech superpower.
Lastly…
I thought of an idea just at the end of writing this which was a Fintech CX awards edition of the newsletter where I’d send out a short survey with different categories (best in-app experience, best onboarding journey, coolest feature launch, best out of app experience etc). Let me know if that’s something you’d be interested in by selecting an option in this poll! 😊
honestly i hardly realized all those difficulties behind banks' transformation endeavor. thanks for the systematic digest