CHALLENGE

​

To improve the experience of dissatisfied customers with the financial advisory journey of Itaú Private Bank. 

​

PROCESS

​

Redesigning the financial advisory experience of the largest Private Bank in Latin America was one of the greatest challenges of my career so far. During the 6-month project, I was the design lead of the Agile team responsible for planning and leading the workflow, leading each stage from understanding to prototype testing, alongside a team of 5 people. It was the first time that design would be used in Itaú Private Bank as a methodology to solve business problems, so I needed to adopt a pragmatic approach, methods that were agile and data-driven so that executives could trust and understand where we would arrive despite experiencing the process for the first time.

​

PLANNING THE PROJECT

​

I guided the project PMO on the stages we would follow for the work, as well as the time needed to execute each one. I divided the project moments as follows:

​

• Framing the challenge

• Desk research

• Experts interviewing

• Mapping the customer journey

• Setting the personas

• Defining the opportunities

• Ideation

• Prototyping

• Test

• Presenting learnings

​

​

PLANNING

​

In total, I defined a 6-month work schedule, based on the Design Thinking methodology and considering the availability of participants and leadership. I organized 2 working teams. 1 core with 5 key collaborators: PMO, Design Lead, Researcher, Data Science, and Business Analyst. The second group was activated as needed for the project stage and included collaborators from the commercial, data, credit, investments, wealth planning, legal, and compliance areas.

 

UNDERSTANDING AND SCOPING THE CHALLENGE

​

I started the project by defining long-term goals and possible barriers to successfully achieving the objective with the core group. Then we mapped what we already knew about the challenges involved and what we needed to discover using the CSD matrix (certainties, assumptions, and doubts). We then raised known pain points that customers most reported, as well as internal problems experienced within the company that the customer often did not know about but ultimately influenced their experience.

​

We created an initial sketch of the financial advisory journey co-created with the support of commercial team members who served customers directly.

​

All this information served to better understand and refine the challenge we would solve in addition to directing the investigation stage through this "heat map," with the main points to be covered, as we now had visibility of moments of the journey that could be more critical and what we still needed to investigate.

​

GOING DEEP

​

We started the investigation process by mapping the data and information we had on the clients in question, both in CRM systems and in the knowledge of the service teams. Our goal was to better understand who these clients were in aspects related to financial knowledge level, digital behavior, investment objectives, and needs.

In parallel, we analyzed our recent satisfaction survey database, filtering clients who gave lower scores for the financial advice they received. In these surveys, in addition to the score, clients also described why they gave the score qualitatively.

​

As we collected this data, we classified customers' pain points into themes, and after analyzing over 1,800 comments and 57 pain themes, by crossing the financial advice scores with the themes, we discovered that only 4 pain themes were responsible for generating detractor scores.
 

DEFINING THE OPPORTUNITIES
 

With this investigation, it was possible to refine and complement the financial counseling journey that clients went through, as well as create customer personas.
 

After the investigation, we knew:
 

• what the characteristics and main needs of the clients were

• what influenced the financial counseling experience

• which moments of the journey were crucial for the success of the project.
   

The opportunities were related to four major themes: proximity, proactivity, trust, and usability, which we divided into four big questions:
 

• Proactivity

• Proximity

• Trust

• Usability
   

IDEATION

​

Based on the opportunities and their defined success criteria, I proceeded to create the co-creation dynamic in multidisciplinary teams.

​

I divided the groups by challenge/big question. Each of the four groups was composed of a variety of professionals and had in their hands the relevant moments of the journey that needed to be worked on, as well as the customer pain points reported in each moment related to the challenge at hand.

​

Before the hands-on moment, each group received inspirations from analogous cases and benchmarks of organizations solving similar problems. During this stage, the participants took note of the information that deserved attention and acquired repertoire to later create solutions.

​

The ideation followed the flow:

​

• Sharing inspirations

• Note-taking

• Individual ideation

• Silent voting

• Group concept ideation
   

I systematized the group ideation in the "lotus-blossom" framework, where the teams generated ideas always keeping in mind the big question that the solutions needed to answer, as well as the success criteria that were crucial for each solution to succeed.
 

Next, the group voted on the ideas they found most interesting and had the greatest potential to achieve the goal, so they could refine, complement, and detail them better as a group.
 

At the end of the ideation, over 30 ideas were considered for the prioritization backlog, and three concepts were prioritized by the leadership for testing after an evaluation of effort x impact.
 

PROTOTYPING
 

We then created the storyboard with each action that needed to happen in the tests for the solution hypotheses to be validated.

We recruited some clients from the researched database, taking into consideration the characteristics of the created personas.

​

THE RESULTS
 

After we received a lot of feedback from users we iterate 3 solutions, that are being implemented as MVPs at the company. 

​

• OnePage Client for Comercial teams always know how to deal with each client
   

• Personalized Push Warnings using triggers to contextualized offers
   

• Private Bank App with a Benefits Program to retain clients and explore cross selling.

​