UX/UI
Interaction design
Visual design
Design systems thinking
Product strategy
Prototyping
Art direction
Citibank, a brand with immense heritage offer a wide breadth of financial services and products to millions of customers spread all over the globe. This includes everything from traditional banking products to investing, financial advisors and mortgages.
However, the financial services industry is changing. Banks are now competing with lean and hungry startups (and scaleups) that offer products and services that are chipping away at their business model and putting user experience at the core.
This is particularly true in the area of personal investments and wealth management. To compete, Citi needed to reinvent their wealth offering to create an experience which is much more seamless, user focused and one that exceeds that of their competitors.
We were challenged to define a ‘best in class’ customer trading experience that stands out in a crowded industry.
We created a ‘North Star’ creative vision that defined 3 key hero journeys (and personas) and built out an expansive product experience across their mobile app and web platforms.
There was no single place where a Citi user could see a full picture of their wealth across their retail, investments and their other Citi financial products. This fragmented view was reinforcing the siloed approach to our users financial health. To address this we created a holistic dashboard experience for everything from a credit card payment to an investment portfolio integrating Wealth with the rest of the Citi offering.
Our purpose is to facilitate growth, to help people, whoever they are, feel good about money and achieve their goals. These goals might be focused on saving for their first property or planning for their childrens education. Or it could even be as simple as planning for a big trip. Irregardless of the goal we wanted to provide a framework to help users achieve these goals, to break them down into tangible and measurable steps. Our portfolio builder allowed users to do just that.
"I like seeing the positive and the negative as it helps me manage my expectations"
Testing respondent, Seasoned investor
A space where users can explore the world of trading and educate themselves in the skills needed to invest effectively was critical. This needed to be so much more than simply a list of stocks to purchase. It needed to be richer, to educate and to wherever possible be personalised. It included content such as personalised stock lists, cause based investing based on their money personality and access to bitesized education topics.
“To have recommendations about what would make sense based on my habits... I think is just very helpful to have”
Sienna, Unseasoned investor
Every user will have different goals, interests and circumstances. We wanted
to embrace this and create an experience that was personalised and unique to each users wants and needs. To achieve this we captured insights on users spending habits, risk appetite and investment experience through a ‘money personaility’ quiz.
Investors increasingly want to invest in ways that match their values. We have seen this through both our research and our testing. As a result we made thematic investing and ESG an integral part and key USP of the Future of Trading experience. This allowed us to showcase new, topical and engaging ways to invest based around themes that are important to our users.
This approach encouraged and gave direction to users on how they could do this and growing and evolving alongside the user. Content featured included curating relevant news based on their existing investments, promoting investments that matched their values and educating users in a wider sense on how to invest positively around their themes and values.
“I want to invest in things that I personally use and believe in as an investor. To see what companies I might be not aware of that would make a difference - align my ideas and principles. I think it’s an amazing feature”
Christine, Seasoned investor
We wanted to give users a tool that gives them more granular and immersive insights that feel human, relatable and ultimately actionable. The investment Check-Up tool was the answer to this problem. It provided a detailed breakdown of users investments with real time, bespoke analysis of the users holdings along with highlighting actions that could be taken.
A user could very quickly apply a number of different lenses to their investment portfolio with data-driven views based on type, sector, performance, geography and impact. Using this tool our users could get a holistic view of how they are investing and uncover vulnerabilities and over exposures complete with suggestions on how to overcome these possible pitfalls.
“I haven’t seen anything like this (Investment check-up) elsewhere, I do Robinhood mostly and it’s very user friendly but it doesn’t go as far as this. This is super helpful… I just learned something.”
Monique, Seasoned investor
Our vision piece enabled Citi to align on a ‘North Star’ for a seamless investment and banking experience that matched and exceeded many of the new entrants to market. Critically it enabled our client to make the case for ‘Wealth’ being a core part of Citi’s proposition and business model. From a business organisation sense this has since been implemented with Wealth and retail banking being brought together in a singular operational structure.
Our vision piece defined what a seamless banking and investment experience looks like obtaining buy in from key strategic stakeholders.
Strategic outlook
