Image Credit : Newcastle Permanent Building Society
Project Overview
Newcastle Permanent Building Society (“NPBS”), one of Australia’s largest customer-owned banks, is on a quest to deliver ‘Australia’s Favourite Banking Experience’. To deliver on this vision there is a supporting program of work centred around digital transformation. ARQ was selected as Newcastle Permanent’s strategic design partner to spearhead this body of work focussed on their customer’s digital banking experience. Since 2019 ARQ Group and NPBS have developed a strong partnership through design strategy, capability uplift and scalable design execution for multiple delivery squads starting with the Mobile Banking channel’s refresh of a new mobile application.
NPBS’s customer base is skewed to an older demographic who’ve traditionally relied on physical channels (i.e. the branch network) to undertake their banking. Becoming ‘Australia’s Favourite Banking Experience’ aims to deliver a digital banking solution with a human touch, re-inventing the banking experience for existing customers and also attracting a younger demographic who can leverage NPBS’s attractive deposit and home loan product offerings.
NPBS is:
• Recognised as an industry leader with 326,000 customers
• One of Australia’s largest customer-owned financial institutions
• Recognised by Forbes as one of the World’s Best Banks in 2021 and 2020 and Roy Morgan as best Building Society/Credit Union of the year in 2021 and 2020
Organisation
Newcastle Permanent Building Society
Team
Newcastle Permanent Building Society
Arq Group
Project Brief
How might we bring NPBS’s award winning in-real-life CX to customers in online channels? ARQ was chosen as the strategic design partner to lead the NPBS team through designing a new Mobile Banking experience that would transform the NPBS digital channels and ultimately achieve the vision of becoming Australia’s Favourite Banking Experience.
With a net promoter score almost 50 points ahead of the major banks, NPBS is aware of how important customer experience is to gain competitive differentiation and ensure customer satisfaction. Fintechs and neobanks have markedly increased competition for deposit holders and home loan customers in recent years. True value means being more than just a transactional retail bank. NPBS is proud to be customer owned and wanted to deliver its award-winning and outstanding customer experience offered in person through a new digital channel.
NPBS is a multiple award winner for its great banking products and services. It was a priority to build an app to help make everyday banking easy and fast, and their products more accessible in a digital world. With this ambition, adopting best in class design was a priority to ensure a great customer experience remained the key objective.
The target outcomes in this quest included the modernisation and digitisation of the customer experience, improvement of the operations of the design team, improved collaboration and transition from design to development and the implementation of a design system to optimise the total cost of delivery and ownership.
Project Need
NPBS has an NPS score almost 50 points above the major banks and prides itself on its multi award-winning excellence in customer experience. Prior to the implementation of this project, this great customer experience wasn’t replicated across the digital channels and was fragmented. Cutting edge design practices and ways of working were critical to uplift the overall customer experience.
Design operations:
Newcastle Permanent had a small design capability that worked in silos on the various digital channels. This resulted in unaligned processes, an inability to scale, and created a fragmented experience for customers. Through partnering with ARQ, NPBS were able to introduce standard processes that promoted team cohesion which significantly enhanced the customer experience across multiple channels.
Modern Design Systems:
Design system reduces Total Cost of Ownership as it provides a standard design language across both the visual assets and engineering. The design system brought consistency and quality to products, saving money by accelerating design and development and streamlining the process to launch.
Digital banking with a human touch to increase customer intimacy:
The challenge was to integrate the digital experience with the in-person branch experience. Branch teams are now able to interact more intimately with their customers by guiding them on how to use features in the digital banking platforms for their everyday banking needs. Branch teams are also hosting dedicated ‘Digital Masterclasses’ in their branches, giving hands on support to customers in teaching them how to use the new Mobile App.
User Experience
A relentless focus on the customer and their experience created a truly harmonised experience between in-person banking and online banking. The seamless customer experience across multiple digital touchpoints has been key and has also been designed to scale for future features, such as open banking.
ARQ’s skillset in understanding the market needs through human-centred design techniques allowed for an emphasis on getting right down to the core of the user’s needs and experience through sentiment analysis to assess feelings that has resulted in unparalleled user experience.
Financial fitness:
NPBS’s long-term strategy is to give their customers more insights into personal finance and subsequent financial fitness through better visibility on their transactions and spending patterns. Leveraging technology from Look Who’s Charging the new mobile app’s transactions have been enriched, paving the way to scale personal financial management functionality for customers.
Creating consistency in the user experience:
A large component of ARQ’s approach to ‘designing for scale’ was the development of a design language system for NPBS. ARQ leveraged Atomic Design Principles to set up the foundations to form a modular component library with process and governance in place for team members across design, development and product management. This enabled a consistent visual language that removed individual interpretation/subjective decisions and subsequent fragmented/inconsistent experiences for customers.
Project Marketing
The NPBS App achieved significant growth in both ratings & reviews and increased usage. In the light of these results above the line marketing including TV and roadside billboard was commissioned alongside digital media to drive awareness and adoption.
App store rating and reviews:
In one week, app store ratings rose significantly: iOS 3.8 to 4.7; Android 3.1 to 4.6 – (comparable to or better than all of the Big 4 banks). iOS: 49 reviews increased to 5,600 ratings and Android 1,043 ratings to 1,645 (and counting) - demonstrating strong engagement with this digital channel.
Verbatim from customers include:
“Huge improvements from old App. Delight to use now”.
“Love the new feel of the app”.
“I'm really loving this new design / look of this app & so far, it's very easy to work with & use. To this point, there's been no inconvenient shutdown's like the old app used to do. Thank you NP”.
“Love that you can see how much is available at a glance. It's easy to use the app too”.
“So easy to navigate around internet banking”.
“This is a great app & very user friendly!!”
Project Privacy
The project employed a Privacy by Design approach to ensure all instructions, data handling and storage complies with the Newcastle Permanents’ and legislative privacy requirements.
Terms and Conditions are clearly established within the app for the user to accept before proceeding. This explains how data is kept securely, as well as how it is used and protected.
The app uses secure local storage and strong authentication protocols. All communication between the device and the backend systems is encrypted, ensuring ultimate protection and control over user data.
Digital - Finance
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