myRaiffeisen

BRIEF – Attract new-to-bank customers with a product that steps aside from the traditional Raiffeisen legacy and targets digital native customers.

PROJECT – I joined the 2 years project in its last 8 month. I became part of one out of three feature teams working within Scrum on various epics together with over 30+ Software Developer and several Business Analysts of the Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) reporting to the Product Owner, directed by our Design Director. We were hired as a Strategic Design Consultancy to help one of the largest banks in Central and Eastern Europe to increase customer engagement while growing into the regional mobile banking market. Together we designed and brought to market a mobile banking experience, supported the creation of an in-house design team, and built a design system to optimize future projects. Further, network banks like RBI mostly rely on very fragmented systems that makes collaboration and data exchange hard, a new solution would impulse a unified approach to data and a common way of working. Further, with PSD2, banks are required to offer APIs to allow the users to access their information  through any enabled mobile app, which provided the opportunity to innovate. As partnering entity we were asked to drive the entire project with a Design Thinking approach applying User-Centred Design from the very beginning inn order to be able to design and develop a simple and intuitive mobile app featuring competitive banking offerings to its target groups.  

TEAM – Design Director, Team of 6 Designers (Design Research, UX, UI, Interaction Design), Business Analysts, Product Owners

PROCESS – Over 18 months, we designed a simple, intelligent daily banking experience for both iOS and Android. With the team at RBI, we developed new features, while validating design solutions through user research and competitor benchmarking. The team also led hiring and onboarding of in-house designers, and supported marketing with the product launch. In parallel, we built a design system to optimize future production and ensuredesign consistency for RBI.

CONCEPT – Together we developed a new approach to banking by creating a meaningful narrative around personal finance. Traditional banking apps cluster spending in categories like "Restaurants" and "Clothing", but our research revealed that users don't think in categories - they think in contexts. For myRaiffeisen, we created Lenses, an innovative approach that lets users group their spending in ways that have context and meaning. For example, "Little Things" includes all expenses below a certain amount, showing how much is spent in small purchases that you may not notice.

IMPACT – myRaiffeisen went live on the App Store and Google Play store in Hungary, with over 10,000 users. The average user rating is 4.5 stars on iOS and 4.3 stars on Android.

LEARNINGS – Overall
- A trustful relationship between PO and design team is key
- Key stakeholders and team members need to understand the value of design (and the necessary workflow) beyond screen design
- Investing time at the start to build a solid design foundation with a clear brand/product rationale helps develop a coherent product
- Don’t underestimate development and business-decision time and effort
- Efforts for research spikes should be better considered in the timeline, cannot not run in parallel

LEARNINGS – Team
- A stable core team helped keep the project vision in focus and time
- Content lead not directly involved in production but responsible for client communication, overall vision and quality control
- Same travel rhythm for the whole project team allowed a sustainable, productive workflow
- Understand before challenging (especially during onboarding of new team members)
- Regular benchmarking and internal design reviews ensured quality and state of the art delivery