CommBank Digital Transformation
The White Agency was CommBank’s digital agency of record for 7 years, and for a large part of that time I was a senior member of the strategy team, initially leading individual projects before leading the strategic relationship for the last 3 years of the relationship. The client-agency relationship ended when CommBank grew its internal team and insourced the majority of digital work.
Overview
CommBank was on a journey to revolutionise digital banking. With an ambitious CTO, who went on to become CEO, they were investing in upgrading their core banking system, and wanted to use their digital banking as a competitive advantage.
They were investing in infrastructure, systems and talent, and needed an agency partner to help them build the future of digital banking. I was a core member of that agency team, working with internal marketing, digital, product, IT and strategy teams.
Digital Product Development
We created and managed a number of products as CommBank built out their digital eco-system.
One highlight was the Property Guide, born from a brief to make mobile banner ads that turned into a unique selling tool for CommBank in the home loans space for a number of years. Based on the insight that ‘people want a home, not a home loan’, we created a digital property guide to help people find the house they were looking floor. It was incredibly successful, driving 45+ home loan leads per week.
Another highlight was upgrading the ATM screens, and building a completely new interface to simplify ATM usuage for millions of customers.
Mobile Banking
I was part of the team that worked on CommBank’s first mobile banking app, called Kaching, which enabled a range of firsts in the Australian market including making payments to Facebook accounts, simplifying person-person payments, and introducing touch payments via an NFC enabled sticker that could be attached to the phone.
We were responsible for everything from shortlisting name options, to design of the app, and the marketing campaign that surrounded it.
Product Optimisation
I worked directly on a number of optimisations and new initiatives for different product lines, including:
Home loans - overhauling the home loans section of the website to make it more user centric with less ‘bank speak’. We focused on helping people to understand the different types of home loan, building a set of tools & guides to help people understand their borrowing and repayment capacity, and helping them understand the sometimes hidden costs that they may not have been aware of.
Credit cards - reimagining the credit cards section and completely simplifying it. At the time CommBank offered >10 credit cards, and the differences between them weren’t immediately clear. I worked with the Credit Cards Product Team to design a product selector tool that helped people to find the best card for their needs based on the answer to a small number of questions.
Personal loans - I designed the experience for a Personal Loans calculator which helped people to understand how much they were likely to be approved for. This had the dual benefits of increasing the number of applications received, and increasing the average application amount.
Children’s Accounts - I worked as part of a team that designed and built ‘Coinland’, a virtual world that helped to teach kids the value of money. In the game they had to do jobs/chores to earn money, which they banked and could save up to buy in-game merchandise or to progress to new areas.
Redesigning CommBank.com
I was a member of a small team that was responsible for developing a new strategy for CommBank.com.au, and I was personally responsible for writing the final strategy document output and jointly delivering it to a wide range of stakeholders.
We followed a human centred design approach, conducting 45 1-1 customer/user interviews, 88 stakeholder meetings/workshops, and developing 22 user personas across the breadth of customers/clients the bank deals with (retail, business, corporate & institutional, private wealth and stakeholders.)
The final strategy document contained:
Audience and user insights
A vision for the future, including an overall vision, customer experience promise, experience pillars and principles
10 strategic components that defined the future capability and experience for CommBank.com
Example customer journeys using the vision for the future
The final report was well received by CommBank, and was used as the basis for the internal team to take on a website redesign process.
Onboarding to Netbank
As well as working on the public facing website, I co-developed the NetBank onboarding strategy with a colleague.
There were two challenges with NetBank:
To try to make all accounts ‘quality accounts’, which meant they were being used regularly by the customers, and
Collect relevant customer data to enable targeted cross-sell activity and increase share of wallet.
We undertook detailed user research, data analysis and a large international comparative review to better understand the landscape. This enabled us to tackle both challenges, firstly designing a new onboarding experience; and secondly designing new functionality and tools to give CommBank a way of collecting more customer data that provided a true value exchange.
Impact
My work contributed to CommBank being seen as a global leader in digital banking and building competitive advantage within the local market.
The work I was involved with won multiple awards, both for effectiveness and creativity. Ultimately it was so successful that CommBank built a large internal team to take over the work, as it became so strategically important.