Project Overview
Say hello to the new Westpac iPhone App, making mobile banking faster, simpler and smoother. Our app has been completely re-designed with customer input and re-built from the ground-up on a brand new scalable framework to ensure we give our customers the best user experience, now and into the future.
Organisation
Project Brief
83% of Westpac customers prefer mobile banking; so delivering an outstanding app experience is essential. The new app had to be intuitive and user-friendly with new and improved features. What was central to the brief became our guiding design principles – an app experience that was familiar, inclusive, intentional, contextual, accessible and scalable. Focusing on these elements would help us with the objective of helping customers do their everyday banking easily and efficiently in a modern, native mobile app.
Project Need
Customers will enjoy the App’s new and improved features. Our onboarding journey means new-to-bank customers can now setup accounts and start transacting within minutes. Intuitive navigation and our Smart Search tool help customers quickly make payments, search transactions, and locate banking services. Making a payment is faster, going from 12 steps to just four; and making a transfer is also super quick and easy with our Drag & Drop feature. It’s also now easier for customers to repeat regular payments and transfers in the app through voice activation with our new Siri Shortcuts feature. Through the Card Hub, customers can manage and service all their cards in one place with ease and security. They can transact without physical cards using Apple Wallet or set up a Digital Card with a dynamic CVV/CVC – an Australian first. Customers can now also personalise their banking experience by adding a profile picture, choosing from a range of wallpapers and app icons, and also share gift eCards as payment receipts to celebrate moments such as ‘Happy Birthday’.We’ve also introduced new features to help our customers feel safe and in control, and better understand their spending. For example, tapping on a processed transaction now shows more information about the merchant like their logo, address and website. We also block inappropriate language from outgoing payments and allow customers to report transactions with abusive messaging. Digital Gambling Block lets customers block or unblock gambling transactions on eligible cards, helping them take more control over their spending.
User Experience
Our App experience hasn’t just been designed for customers; it’s been designed with them. Working with customers who use our app every day to send or receive payments and pay bills, we created an app experience that combines cutting edge features with over 200 years of banking experience.
Our design principles were set at the beginning of the project and continued to guide us throughout development. These principles combined with usability studies, data and market research, user and accessibility testing and pilot programs shaped the product. Approximately 40 rounds of usability testing took place involving over 200 customers and also two rounds of scaled testing with 200 customers in each round. In addition to this, we ran a pilot with approximately 1500 Westpac Group staff members and 300 customers. We listened, regular feedback helped us understand how customers felt about the new app experience and allowed us to prioritise and make regular improvements to the app, creating the experience they told us they wanted.
Our App needed to be an inclusive experience to help all customers. Accessibility was considered through all phases of the App’s lifecycle from design, development and through to testing. We tested the App extensively in-house and externally including people with lived experience of disability. We also encouraged feedback from disability advocacy organisations to ensure that we continue to enhance and deliver improvements to help all customers.
Project Marketing
Our App was marketed across multiple digital and out-of-home channels including TV, social media, Google and Apple Ads, Spotify, website partnerships, bus portrait slides and more. These campaigns performed well in the target segment of millennials. The Westpac brand had recently been refreshed with the new App being among the first assets to introduce our new look.. Since the launch, we’ve seen improved perceptions of ‘Westpac making by banking easier, not more difficult’ up 12% points for our target market and up 5% points for non-customers, now ranking 1st for both audiences amongst the big four. With an increase in digital customer-onboarding and banking expected, the App will continue to represent Westpac delivering new functionality as part of a simpler, smarter and smoother bank.
Project Privacy
The new Westpac App is designed to be highly resistant to attack. Access to the code is protected by GuardSquare, a leading edge capability that detects attacks and protects the integrity of the code. No sensitive personal information is stored on the application, and any elements that need to be preserved across sessions are protected by the security hardware on the phones known as TEEs, or Trusted Execution Environments. These TEEs play a critical role in providing rock solid security for what is a key usability win for our customers, namely the biometric login, which is not only easier to use but far more secure.
Each of the many features that are supported within the App were subject to repeated code reviews and penetration testing and retesting. Only once each feature reached the required balance - between intuitive, secure and fast execution - were they approved.
The App is protected by our market-leading technology Westpac Protect™ Adaptive Authentication – a comprehensive, real-time, authentication and fraud detection platform that provides a frictionless user experience for most users whilst ensuring the highest level of security. It is also equipped with a self-learning risk engine that leverages statistical machine learning technology that utilises over one hundred indicators to evaluate the risk of an activity in real-time.
We’re committed to protecting the privacy and data of our customers and are bound by numerous policies to safeguard information. Our privacy policy is available at https://www.westpac.com.au/privacy/
Digital - Finance
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