Driving Growth For a Storied Financial Institution
1
The Scenario
Citizens Financial Group is one of the country’s oldest and largest financial services companies. They attribute their ongoing success to be able to build long relationships with their customers and communities. When we began working with Citizens, they were in a transition phase in their structure and approach to banking. Through acquisitions and new partnerships, they were going from a regional bank to a national bank with constantly evolving capabilities. They needed their site to not only showcase their new capabilities, but also highlight their proven track record and set them up for success in their
continued growth.
2
The Challenge
Though the Citizens’ Commercial and Wealth teams have different customers, they had similar site goals to build credibility, increase consideration, and drive leads. However, they had very limited site performance data to understand how users were navigating through the site and what content was the most engaging and compelling to achieve those goals. We partnered with their Commercial and Wealth teams to first understand their distinct clients' needs and expectations from a digital experience. With the DART team and their in-house research team, we conducted user interviews to identify customer Jobs to be done (JTBD). We audited their overall experience and the experiences of over 25 financial services companies including top banking institutions to identify gaps, differentiating opportunities, and experiential inspiration.
For both BUs, we developed a strategy led by the user’s financial goals and how Citizen’s approach and expertise could help them achieve the goals.
Though our projects were for specific business units, we needed to ensure that our recommendations had a holistic approach that could be leveraged within any section of the site. To do this we collaborated closely with their internal design teams to leverage assets within their existing system, and identify opportunities for improvement or net new components. Acting as the strategic lead through the design and copywriting phase, we worked closely with the Citizens Commercial team to ensure our strategic vision for the new site experience was carried through in design.
