Launching a Big Four Bank into Fintech

The Problem

A major Australian bank identified Small to Medium Enterprise (SME) as one of the least supported groups in its customer base. The bank recognised that to bring real value to its SMEs and grow its market share of this segment, it needed to create a powerful digital product specifically for their needs – and it needed to harness the power of data, machine learning and the cloud to do this.

While the bank had an innovation arm tasked with new product development as well as access to a vast amount of external and internal data, they soon recognised another need: The bank didn’t just want to improve the SME experience, it wanted to re-imagine it. And they needed a partner to drive this world-first innovation.

By engaging Kablamo, they embarked on a research-based product development journey that would culminate in a next-generation SME financial cloud based platform.

Our Approach

A critical component of Kablamo’s Product Strategy & Design approach is target-market quantitative and qualitative research, so we launched a program of deep consultation to comprehensively map the needs of SMEs. Unlike traditional design agencies, Kablamo does not let user research slow down build of re-usable and flexible solution components. Within two weeks of kickoff, we had a working customer landing page in AWS, animation and mock branding.

In parallel with around 200 hours of user testing, Kablamo worked with the bank to design and build a next generation, cloud-native SME digital platform. The underlying cloud solution had a strong focus on building secure infrastructure, and the ease of integration with the bank’s partners.

Kablamo worked hand-in-hand with the bank’s internal data team to design and build an intelligent data platform, with Machine Learning capabilities, which could ingest large amounts of SME data to provide insights and recommendations to customers.

User deep dive

Balanced rapid product development with 500+ user interviews and 200 hours of testing.

Future ready

Adding new company value with digital design

UX on ML

User-experience testing to hone algorithm outputs.

The Results

A thoroughly researched next-gen SME financial platform was launched into a closed pilot, with real customers and their banking data, within 12 months of kickoff. The bank acquired additional insights for building a strong, next generation SME financial platform.

The new digital experience was designed to deliver new customer value via an intelligent data platform, using machine learning, and a great customer experience.

Many features could be added and built into the platform – Kablamo and the bank built an accounting solution that could couple with financing options, ASP integration, and invoice reminders and alerts.

Finally, Kablamo worked with the wider stakeholders in the bank to make this one of the first production workloads, including customer data, that was securely deployed in AWS. This marked another major step for the bank to become cloud-based, agile and future-ready.

“To build a product people love to use, you have to design for them – not at them.”
- Allan Waddell
co-CEO of Kablamo

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