Savana partnered with Woodforest National Bank, which operates over 760 bank branches, to develop an account-opening solution for in-branch customers. I was tasked with leading the design of this solution.
Please note that certain details and information have been omitted or altered to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the organizations involved.*
Create a seamless account opening experience for customers that is as easy as the online experience.
Design a compliant, efficient, and adaptable solution that can meet various client requirements and federal regulatory standards.
Automate and modernize manual workflows to increase flow efficiency and data accuracy.
Researching for an enterprise account opening solution posed challenges compared to customer-facing projects. Since access to competitive solutions was limited, I relied heavily on two sources.
Industry Insight
Throughout the project, I closely collaborated with a subject matter expert with over 15 years of experience in banking and managing branches.
Later in November 2023, a subject matter expert was assigned to the project, bringing additional banking expertise and fresh perspectives.
Client Meetings
We met with the client team multiple times to understand their current account opening processes, pain points, and desired outcomes.
Learning from the online banking project with Battle Bank, Savana introduced a new protocol to establish cross-functional teams early in the project.
Our team included a UX designer (myself), a product manager with over a decade of industry expertise, and a system architect.
His collaboration ensured alignment with project requirements and technical feasibility, leading to a more efficient design and development process.
When designing the branch account opening solution, our goal was to simplify and automate the user flow for bankers while maintaining consistency and reusing as much of the online banking visual components and interaction logic as possible.
Multi-Titling Within the Same Flow Multi-tilting allows bankers to open multiple accounts for the customers within the same flow, minimizing repetitive data entry and human entry errors.
For example, a family of three can come into the bank and open individual, joint, and/or minor accounts within the same account opening flow.
Hardware Integration We automatically collected customer information to simplify the data collection process for bankers, by incorporating the functionality to scan IDs using Woodforest's existing ID scanners.
Reduce Duplication of Customer Profiles We required bankers to search the customers at the beginning of the flow to prevent the creation of duplicate customer profiles.
Pre-Populate Entered Personal Information For applications with multiple customers, we pre-populated previously entered data for subsequent customers in the flow, such as their primary address.
Finding the balance between maintaining consistency with the online account opening (OAO) experience and designing flows to accommodate different end-users and regulatory standards was challenging. After many discussions, we agreed to prioritize the efficiency and flexibility of branch flows over strict adherence to online account opening processes.
Given the solution's enterprise-facing nature and information-heavy interface:
Replaced the application progress card on the left with an account owners card
Bankers, who open accounts daily, don't need reminders of the application process.
Instead, the new card provides a quick view of all customers opening the accounts.
Multi-titling was a key feature that demanded significant design attention to balance the increased flexibility while staying consistent with the OAO.
By moving this section to the later half of the flow, we remained largely consistent with OAO.
The updated designs were handed over for full development before implementation began.
Working closely with a software architect from the start provided crucial technical insights, minimizing redesigns and enhancing overall project understanding.
Leveraging reusable components from the online account opening project and consulting our system architect for new design constraints, the team developed happy path flows for the personal finance products in just two - three weeks.
