Finance | Experience Design | B2C | CX Strategy
Unifying 50+ Banking Digital Touchpoints
Client
Commonwealth Bank
Timeline
6 months
Role
CX Strategy & Design Lead
Overview & Challenge
Commonwealth Bank had a complex digital ecosystem consisting of over 50 customer-facing digital assets. This presented customers with a fragmented and inconsistent digital experience with the Bank. I collaborated with design agency Frog to create a comprehensive customer experience vision and roadmap for the Bank's digital channels.
Key Challenges
- Fragmented customer experience across dozens of digital touchpoints
- Inconsistent design, functionality, and tone across different platforms
- Limited customer trust in financial institutions (only 35% believed banks act in their best interests)
- Varying levels of customer financial engagement and digital confidence
- Need for both digital innovation and human connection
- Balancing simplicity with the inherent complexity of financial services
My Approach & Contribution
As the lead UX representing the bank and working with the Frog team day-to-day, I guided a comprehensive approach to reimagine the entire digital ecosystem.
Key Activities
1. Led extensive customer research to understand behaviours, unmet needs, and pain points
3. Facilitated workshops to draw out major insights, discuss top opportunities, and assess potential ideas
5. Created user archetypes based on seven behavioural axes, later refined into personas
7. Mapped five major customer journeys and validated them with subject matter experts
2. Identified 17 key themes reflecting customer needs, including trust, human touch, loyalty, and financial management
4. Developed 10 key initiatives and opportunities to transform the digital experience
6. Analysed market research data to map customer segments to financial and digital needs
8. Created concept prototypes addressing major financial opportunity areas
Through our research, we found that consumer sentiment towards their finances was mixed—but we saw opportunities to help them secure their financial wellbeing. We uncovered four primary customer needs: confidence, control, genuine intent, and a human touch.
Results & Impact
01
Created a transformative customer experience vision for the entire digital ecosystem
03
Developed actionable implementation plans across all digital touchpoints
05
Established customer journey mapping as a standard practice for strategy development
02
Established financial wellbeing as a central vision for digital services
04
Created a roadmap for implementing a cohesive omni-channel experience
06
Identified 10 strategic initiatives, including simplification/integration between Banking and Wealth, Customer Conversations, and SME Experiences Beyond Transactions
Key Learnings
Banking is as much about trust as technology. Digital tools alone aren't enough - customers need confidence and guidance when making financial decisions that affect their lives.
Human connection remains essential even in digital channels. Despite all our technological progress, customers still value personal recognition and support. The most effective digital banking experiences find ways to make people feel seen and understood.
Transparency builds deeper relationships than convenience. While streamlined experiences matter, customers value honest, clear visibility into their financial situation even more. They want control and simplicity without feeling like important details are being hidden.
The project delivered a strategic roadmap that unified fragmented experiences and provided clear direction for digital evolution. By focusing on customer needs rather than organisational structure, we created a vision that placed customers at the centre of the bank's digital strategy.
Deep Dive in Research
The research approach was broad, focused on understanding consumers' relationships to their finances and the role digital plays in their financial lives. We studied behaviours and captured feedback through a mix of generative and evaluative methods, identifying interconnected themes that don't exist in isolation.
Market Research
Retail market survey also helped us identify, size and bring to life priority customer segments in relation to both their financial and digital needs to inform the CBA online customer experience strategy. We re-analysed the large survey data to map it to the actual characteristics of the consumer archetypes.
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Final Consumer Archetypes
Ideation and Concept Prototyping
We have created 5 major customer journeys driven by the research and ran several workshops with the bank's SMEs to validate and enhance these journeys. After these efforts, customer journey mapping became the standard before starting any strategy roadmaps for digital initiatives.
Driven by customer needs, we have created new concept prototypes addressing major financial opportunity areas such as day-to-day banking, retirement and small business start-ups. We developed the concepts based on extensive storyboarding with CBA and Frog core teams' collaboration.
