SAN DIEGO – “Digitalbanking has provided huge convenience for our customers,”Stephen Bowe (pictured at left), head of digital for Bank of NewZealand, told the audience at NetFinance Interactive during apresentation called Reimagining the Interface to Money.“We are all more connected to our money than ever before – but hasdigital banking created a meaningful engagement?”

In most instances, according to Bowe, the answer was no.

“The concept of user experience has been restricted to thinkingabout how we can reduce the whole process to as few clicks aspossible,” Bowe said. “With digital banking today, ourrelationships with our customers are becoming increasinglytransactional and our services are becoming commoditized.”

Bowe said that BNZ built its whole business on the idea ofhelping customers “to be good with their money,” but that thebank's digital banking platform didn't necessarily support that goal. He said this goal is especially importantwhen serving the youth market, and thus creates more of achallenge, since this market tends to favor digital channels.

“When we looked at our performance in the youth segment, werealized that we were losing more customers than we wereacquiring,” Bowe said. “We knew we had to do something to make BNZmore appealing to younger customers.

“We started with an intense period of customer research to tryand understand what motivated our customers, what they were tryingto achieve, how they really felt about our bank,” Bowe added. Theend result was a totally reimagined digital banking platform, whichBowe demonstrated for the audience.

Gone were thetraditional lists of accounts and transactions. Bowe showed theaudience a digital platform (shown at left) that was entirelyvisual – where most everything was represented by an icon.

For example, Bowe opened a new account by clicking the “Add anAccount” icon. He named the account, clicked a radio button toindicate the type of account, clicked OK and the account was readyfor use.

To fund the account, he dragged the icon from another account tothe new account's icon. A screen popped up asking him how much hewanted to transfer. Bowe entered the amount, clicked OK again, andthe account was funded.

To have his debit card draw funds from the new account, hesimply dragged the new account's icon to the debit card's icon.

Bowe said that during their customer research phase, onequestion they asked customers was whether the customer used thedigital banking platform's search feature. One gentleman's answerstood out. “He said he used it once,” said Bowe, “but it didn'twork like Google, so he never used it again.”

That resulted in a new search feature that initiates the searchwhile the user is typing, much like Google does.

“The experience our customers expect from us is not defined byother banks,” Bowe concluded. “It's defined by the customer'sexperience with other leaders in the digital world.”