New customer experience for individual investors
Challenge
Investment products always pose a challenge for bank's retail customers. They are perceived as difficult to understand, risky and leading to inevitable loss.
Solution
Improve customers education and awareness of investment products by providing trasnparent offering and tools to evaluate personal investment profile.
Intro
In 2016 Bank Millennium, along other polish banks, started the process of adaptation to MiFID II legislative act.
MiFID II was designed by European Union to increase transparency, enhance investor protection, and standardize regulatory practices across EU financial markets.
A specially assigned team consisting of two designers, a researcher and four subject matter experts, was given a task to evaluate the impact of MiFID II on the investment offering. And the assessment led to a conclusion.
Presentation of investment products is not only incompatible with MiFID II requirements, but also outdated and unclear.
Understand
In the understand phase of the project, I worked three-way.
I became individual investor to emphatize with bank clients
I collaborated with investment experts to understand the bank's products.
I benchmarked local competitors and key global players in the retail investments.
Research
In that phase I have participated in over 40 in-depth interviews.
More than 70% of interviewees felt overwhelmed by financial jargon and feared hidden risks
More than 90% expressed a desire for educational content or financial guidance
More than 90% expressed interest in the potential tool that would help them asses the investing risk
Personas
In the research phase we were able to identify three key personas.
Define
To answer to customer needs identified during IDI sessions, we decided to follow a set of principles to follow across whole customer journey.
Validate
After the release of each new website or process we tracked: traffic, average session times, bounce rates, conversions and compared them to statistics of former versions. If statistics deteriorated (higher bounce rates, conversion decline) we were identifying bottlenecks, ordering client satisfaction surveys via call center or inviting clients to next usability session rounds to get insights for later design improvements.
Results
After the redesign of all elements was implemented, the bank observed improvements in key performance indicators. The outcomes included:
23% visits rise in Investment Section
10% rise in investment product purchases
Successful MiFID II compliance issued by KNF (Polish Financial Supervision Authority)
