In practice, our work has focused primarily on product management and strategy, and business strategy and operations.
To this end, EY has supported the FinTech unit’s primary objective – to foster employee and customer participation in the development of the bank’s digital banking and open banking solutions. This led to the creation and implementation of several successful initiatives:
Improving product delivery
We supported the FinTech unit end-to-end across its product lifecycles, from helping them develop the business case and initial strategy to product launch, product management, and beyond.
Our support stretched across many of the bank’s product lines and across its full portfolio of operations. This work included improving the customer experience through enhanced processes in areas such as account opening, robo-account opening, digital mobile banking, and open banking API.
Scaling up more than ten product lines, we worked through a number of steps to help confirm the right approach, so that – while still acting with a “fail-fast” start-up mentality – the FinTech division was able to continually improve its processes and efficiency. This included:
- Outlining project objectives, business case and acceptance criteria prior to launch
- Developing a deeper understanding of customers, businesses and evolving market trends, to determine the right set of features to answer customer needs
- Facilitating multidisciplinary teams — business, design, engineering, marketing and governance teams — to build and launch features aligned with the product roadmap
- Acting as the voice of the customer by identifying problems, formulating hypotheses, experimenting and continually gathering feedback to improve product offerings
- Prioritizing a features backlog, and owning the product roadmap
- Helping deliver products to market
- Communicating product value to customers through marketing, communications, training and customer support
- Continuously tracking product performance through metrics and KPIs to ensure the strategy continues to effectively meet objectives
To expedite delivery, we brought in dedicated EY customer research and design strategy teams and an integrated, co-located risk and governance team.
Building a global open banking strategy
Having initially worked on the bank’s messaging and communications around the importance of open banking, the EY team then worked to develop the bank’s next generation application programming interfaces (APIs).
Design thinking sessions and a global roadmap
To focus on a key customer problem and align the needs of internal teams across the bank, we hosted a number of workshops with the bank’s staff in both Asia and the US. The aim was to bring together different teams to help them develop a single roadmap for technology, data analytics, customer research, and the FinTech unit.
Within these workshops, our main role was that of a connector between the bank’s team members, highlighting the FinTech unit’s design-thinking and product management methods to the bank’s teams in both Asia and the US.
Customer experience was a key theme of these workshops, allowing the bank to re-explore one of the original objectives behind improving its technological capabilities: to capture the voice of the customer.
By hosting offsite team building days, our teams helped to facilitate dialogue between the bank’s teams, asking:
- What does customer experience mean in a digitized world?
- In order to serve customers today, what are the key capabilities needed by the bank?
- How does the bank go about developing such capabilities, specifically in the digital and product management design space?
Designing digital to physical experiences
We also helped design and build a digitally interactive, physical manifestation of the FinTech unit’s customer app experience in one branch. Over the course of five days, customers were able to communicate how they felt about their finances in person, focusing on their problems and how they could be improved. EY user experience professionals were present to facilitate such dialogue.
The initiative was widely recognized within the wider financial services industry, with EY and our client winning a number of awards for its success.