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

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

“The concept of user experience has been restricted to thinking about how we can reduce the whole process to as few clicks as possible,” Bowe said. “With digital banking today, our relationships with our customers are becoming increasingly transactional and our services are becoming commoditized.”

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

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

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

BNZ online banking Gone were the traditional lists of accounts and transactions. Bowe showed the audience a digital platform (shown at left) that was entirely visual – where most everything was represented by an icon.

For example, Bowe opened a new account by clicking the “Add an Account” icon. He named the account, clicked a radio button to indicate the type of account, clicked OK and the account was ready for use.

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

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

Bowe said that during their customer research phase, one question they asked customers was whether the customer used the digital banking platform's search feature. One gentleman's answer stood out. “He said he used it once,” said Bowe, “but it didn't work like Google, so he never used it again.”

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

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

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