Digital transformation
Summary
As an Associate Creative Director at SapientNitro, I led the RBS/NatWest mobile apps team as well as ideation and innovation streams, an XDL (experience design language) team and won awards for TouchID integration work as well as launching the first retail banking watch product with NatWest for Apple Watch.
Core native mobile apps
Taking the new branding guidelines we redesigned the apps and simplified many of the journeys. The iOS app now has a 5-star rating in the Apple store and is a leading app in customer experience as measured by NPS (Net Promoter Score to measure Customer Loyalty)Winner of several awards including Best Banking App (British Bank Awards 2017), FSTech (best use of technology in financial services), HERMES (best mobile), Digiday (best interactive content) and LOVIES (web services and applications)
Innovation
Long before the watch came out we created a lightweight balance/transactions/notifications app. We prototyped it in code and built a backend. The project was a successful entry into the emerging wearables market and along with notifications it validated low UI, high value passive product design.
Future Banking
Part of our brief was to push the boundaries of what mobile banking could really offer. Omnichannel banking with less barriers between logged in and logged out services.
Highlights
We worked closely with the client to be one of the first banks to implement Apple Pay, ready for launch. Codename was ‘Project LEAP’
We helped NatWest to become the first retail UK bank to use TouchID on their app
The results spoke for themselves, 76% take up in the first 5 days, and as of 2015, 1.2 million people use Touch ID to login to their bank account.
Innovation Workshops
These workshops proved invaluable for the ideation of new features and products for RBS.
TouchID - a UK banking first
When Apple released the TouchID API to third parties, we worked closely with the security department and Apple to deliver the first use of TouchID on any UK banking app.We won gold at the Digital Impact Awards - Best use of digital from the financial services sector.
"Smartphone apps have brought banking to the fingertips of customers the world over and RBS and SapientNitro have brought it even closer to hand.
Taking advantage of Apple’s new TouchID fingerprint sensor, RBS has introduced fingerprint authorisation to its app, allowing millions of mobile banking users to forget tricky passcodes, confusing rules and fumbling fobs. By simply using their own fingerprints, RBS customers can access their finances in seconds. Not only is TouchID faster and easier, it’s also more secure – an essential consideration given that research into the financial services sector shows that 80% of customers prefer biometric to password-based security measures.
The results demonstrated the power of the new service – more than 8,000 Twitter posts referenced it in just 24 hours and in five days, 72% of all capable iOS logins were via TouchID. Press coverage was strong, both online and off, and iOS App Store reviews were boosted from three to four stars."
- Digital Impact awards - Gold award 2015
Young Savers Academy
There is no greater way to show your trust in a bank than to let them help manage your childrens future. After all, nothing is more important to a customer than their children.
Most children have a savings account, primarily set up by their parents. Once they are old enough, they can learn how to save their pocket money, and build a positive relationship with the bank.
The aim of the project is to help young people learn financial responsibility and preparing for the future.
Moolah' was a mobile app which connected to a wireless virtual piggybank.
XDL - Experience Design language
As well as the native mobile and future banking workstreams, I also managed the team that were briefed to create an experience design language for RBS. After an exhaustive audit, we put together a set of experience and design principles, along with a pattern library that guided all designers working on products for RBS.