Financial sector is considered as backbone of modern economy comprises of traditional banks, financial technology (Fintech) companies, payment processors, wealth management companies, pension & insurance providers etc., with customer base that often collectively include and impact almost the entire population of a country.
Over the past decade, the traditional financial sector is facing increasing competition from the Fintech disruptors who are often offering specialized financial solutions such as peer to peer lending, cashless transactions, AI driven financial and trading solutions, financial management tools etc., in a way that is shaking up the traditional financial services model. Apart from being flexible, cheaper alternative and being able to find gaps in the market, one of the major driver for Fintech revolution is awesome customer experience (CX) and the way it is mainly done is by ensuring that users will get the right experience at the right time and place.
As customer experience is becoming the key driver and differentiator in this industry and will play a vital role behind success and growth of the financial institutes, it is important to know what are the most common mistakes financial industry makes when it comes to designing and developing their CX and how can we avoid or fix them.
1. Not designing for trust
Winning people’s trust is a key business objective for financial services industry; as people need trust them in order for them to handle their finances.
However, banks often get stuck with ‘product centric’ and revenue centric thinking and forget about creating amazing experiences. This strategy often makes their financial products complex to understand and difficult to manage; thus create an environment of lack of trust. If they provide simple to understand and use interface as part of their drive for better user experience, it goes a long way to build trust. “Quality of service and ease of use are what customers care about more than any other factors,” according to the World Retail Banking Report. Thus, with CX as the priority, financial institutions have a much better chance of overcoming negative customer perceptions and win trust.
2. Failing to create a smooth client onboarding experience.
Not investing in automated customers onboarding tools is one of the most common mistakes FIs do commit. But implementing such tools is only half the battle. Here are a few other ways customer onboarding can go wrong.
a. Failure to integrate seamlessly Single sign on (SSO) is something FIs need to consider. If they offer multiple products/ services, such as banking, insurance, investment etc., not having one single onboarding can be a huge disappointment. b. Not engaging with customers Automated customer onboarding is extremely effective in helping new users get used to the various features on your product. But no matter how well your onboarding is set up, there are always questions that a new customer need answers for. Without an instant support channel, customers may get stuck and abandon the process altogether. c. Overwhelm the customer Smooth onboarding should help customers to stay focused and finish the task fast. Make sure not to over communicate during the process or not to take the opportunity to nudge them to upgrade the plan or sell some add on services. d. Not personalizing the onboarding Every client is unique and so are their motivations to sign up for your product or service. Given this scenario, it is extremely important for your onboarding to be customized to their unique needs. One way to do this is by structuring your onboarding lessons based on a client survey.
3. Not providing ways to visualize data
We are usually bad at dealing with numbers. It’s especially difficult for humans to compare strings of numbers or complete multi-step calculations. That’s why it’s important to translate that information in a much more digestible form, and data visualization can help.
Not leveraging data visualization into reporting and analysis functions or even into deposits and loans, investments, and other financial activity workflows is a common mistake and lost opportunity to create delightful experiences.
4. Building products with marketing in mind.
Digital products should be built with solving customer’s problem in mind. Not as another promotional tool. Unless its sole purpose is promotional, products should satisfy the customer’s needs. Product designers often include overwhelming amount of promotional messages with excessive numbers of call to actions. Well persistence pays off but unless this tactic is used cleverly, it will create irritation, mistrust and may result in low product adoption. Including too much of promotional material may also make customers concerned about safety and security of their financial and sensitive information.
5. Not being able to unify the experience across platforms
Experiences that match content, functionality, and a coherent brand personality to user expectations, tasks, and context across platforms and touch-points is termed as unified customer experience. The adoption of a unified experience strategy allows the company to follow the customer along the whole relationship cycle and provide more delightful and seamless experience.
Large financial entities often fail to incorporate an unified experience strategy into their experience design process. Reasons behind this issue may be deep rooted to the organization culture. These entities often let their lines of businesses operate in semi autonomous fashion so as their experience and design team. Result is they all may have their own separate design system and experience strategy.
Recently there are signs of change in the landscape and several prominent FIs like Capital One, Wells Fargo etc., are working on unifying their design teams and coming up with their unified design system as well as experience strategy. Fintechs are of course better suited to unify their experiences and are doing excellent job.
6. Copying from competitors
It is tempting to copy from competitors and even easier to get influenced by the big brothers. However, if we are too obsessed with the activities of a competitor, we could be facing unrealistic expectations. At the same time, it could also limit us to focus our resources for innovation in something that a competitor has already done. While it is good to look around and benchmark, it is not wise to think that it is always a good idea to retrofit a solution offered by someone.
Instead it is better to think about what our clients need, map their needs through deep interviews or ethnographic observations that reveal real problems, issues and gaps and come up with solutions that is tailored to the specific needs. Even top-notch teams sometimes fall victim to the “me-too” syndrome. Before providing a solution make sure the problem is thoroughly understood. And make sure that it fits the customers, experience strategy and the brand.
7. Not harnessing the power of artificial intelligence(AI)
Another mistake is not harnessing customer data using AI. Because customer data can provide valuable insights, improve user experiences, and enhance security. Here's how to use AI effectively in this scenario:
a. Collect & Integrate Data: Gather data from various sources, integrating it for AI analysis.
b. Personalized Services: Use AI for tailored product recommendations and financial advice.
c. Chatbots & Predictive Analytics: Implement AI chatbots and predictive analytics to assist customers and forecast their needs.
d. Enhance Security: Employ AI for fraud detection to boost customer trust.
e. Analyze Feedback: Use NLP for customer sentiment analysis and improve services.
f. Continuous Improvement: Continuously adapt services based on customer data insights.
g. AI-Driven Marketing: Create targeted marketing campaigns using AI insights.
h. Robo-Advisors: Develop investment services based on AI and customer profiles.
i. Transparency & Consent: Communicate data use to customers and obtain consent.
By effectively using AI to harness customer data during building and post launch of the digital bank, stakeholders can offer enhanced customer experiences, improve operational efficiency, and stay competitive in the rapidly evolving financial services industry. However, it is crucial to balance the benefits of AI with data privacy, ethical considerations, and regulatory compliance.
8. Taking User Created approach instead of User Centred approach
Blatantly listening to the customer’s voices and incorporating everything into the design thinking may often backfire. It takes a more than just listener’s ears to translate user’s feedback or voices into design implication and solutions. It is not doubt that customers can give genuine insight into their needs, tasks and problems.
Often we conduct design workshops with the users and we co-create. Co-created designs and solutions are just one piece of your puzzle. Those can’t be taken as it is.
But allowing your customers to self-diagnose and self-treat can be a disaster! Users are not designers and there is no way they can see the bigger picture, so listen carefully, dig below the surface, and turn that raw feedback into an outcome that does the trick!
9. Trying to design for everyone
Financial sector clients include a cross-section of society – students, professionals, entrepreneurs, senior citizens etc. While keeping mind mind the saying that ‘when you design for everyone, you design for NO-ONE!’, how do you create a design that works for every segment of users? Reality is, we often end up making this mistake and come up with design solutions that is often lacks usability and appeal.
So just how do you come up with a design that works for a broad variety of users? First of all, you must segment your population and prioritize which segments are most critical (e.g., the 80/20 rule). This is a very difficult, sensitive, and political call that many teams are reluctant to make, insisting instead that their key target is EVERYONE. This is where analytics data, persona and research data comes into picture. Make sure you back your design thinking with data that will justify it.
Another trend is identifying target customers by channel and tailor your design based on that. For example, desktop web version can be designed primarily older population in mind while mobile version can target younger generation. This approach has its own demographic and warrants its own unique strategy.
10. Focusing on Market Research and not User Research
It may not be always the experience designer’s decision, this is often tied to the budgetary constraints and lack of awareness. Stakeholders often push to limit research activities to Market Research only and expect UX team to use the same research data. Stakeholders are often reluctant to go back to the customers for separate set of research.
It is also seen that UX team decides to re-purpose Market Research data for User Research.
And that poses a big problem because although Market Research and User Research both are focused on customers but they are done from very different perspectives and have very different purposes.
Simply put, Market Research is geared more toward buying patterns and User Research tries to find insights on usage patterns. Market Research focuses more on customer opinions about products, rather than observing what people really do. And probing further to understand the reasons behind the behaviours—that’s where UX comes in. Also, getting the UX team to interact with the real users is the first step to having a good understanding of customer mental models, motivations, expectations, and work flows.
So my advise will be, don’t get insights from Market Research data(if available) but do your own User Research.
Final Thoughts
Hope this article will help you to address the key mistakes that financial product designers make and help you to achieve your goal of developing exceptional and usable products. I am also including some bonus tips that you may like to keep in mind during your design process.
Don’t try copy the design of popular Fintech interfaces. Take inspiration instead.
It takes more than just good UX and Design to create a great financial product or platform.
Disruptive design in financial industry doesn’t need to be innovative and unique. It just need to find easy and intuitive solution to real life customer problems.
Build a sense of security around your design solution.
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