The company: The second-largest banking institution in France with 31 million customers, BPCE Banking Group consists of 14 different retail banks and is relied upon by half of the French population.
The challenge: To retain and attract new customers, it embarked on a major digital transformation four years ago. But introducing digital banking to a 200-year-old French financial institution while also keeping in mind user-centered design practices is not an easy task—especially when new European regulations for banking security services, personal data protection, and accessibility have been introduced.
The strategy: Building its first in-house design team to transform the digital banking experience using emotional design tokens.
“A banking experience must convey the feelings of security, trust, efficiency,” said David Serrault, Head of Design at BPCE Group. “Like Gringotts vault door opening in the Harry Potter movie; this is what a banking application should be. Simple, smart, fluid…with a little bit of magic.”
Transforming digital banking into an emotional experience
The newly-developed design team decluttered interfaces and digital touchpoints, created a simple visual vocabulary for all BPCE brands, and slowly introduced motions and haptic interactions.
But designing for functionality and compliance wasn’t enough.
“Like the security vault door opening in the Harry Potter movie; this is what a banking application should be. Simple, smart, fluid…with a little bit of magic.”
“We wanted to provide something more than efficiency to our customers, which was emotion,” David said. “Banking digital experiences don’t have to be cold and severe. Creating an emotional relationship with customers is becoming a key competitive advantage for acquisition and retention.”
However, he added that the banking industry’s strict regulations, coupled with BPCE’s complex IT legacy, presented blockers for introducing emotional design tokens. The other main challenge was convincing key stakeholders the value they’d bring to digital banking apps and platforms.
The design process and outcome
“Through several proof-of-concept applications, we explored what it means for a bank to be ‘emotional,’” David said. “We started by defining principles and metaphors through rounds of prototyping and user tests to convince our very pragmatic stakeholders the value of using emotional design tokens to connect with customers.”
