The Branch of the Future Isn’t a Place
Wells Fargo & Company · Design Innovation
Background
Today, customer’s banking experiences are organized by bank product or business, with the bank dictating the occasion and location of customer interactions. But what if banking experiences were organized around the customer?
A team of executive stakeholders, product managers, designers and engineers was tasked to lead a six-month long enterprise-wide initiative to deliver viable and aspirational concepts related to emerging technologies, workplace efficiencies and customer experiences across lines of business. Responsible for leading design and strategy–through discovery and ideation, design workshops and prototyping–I helped define and articulate innovation over the next 5-10 years at Wells Fargo bringing the abstract into view.
Contribution
– Led design and strategy of a six-months long initiative to discover and articulate a shared vision around future direction of the Branch and customer product experiences
– Co-led special initiatives and executive design workshops to define artificial intelligence [AI] use cases that are in production to enhance customer experiences, increase employee productivity, and accelerate innovation
– Developed a new operating design architecture built around emerging and existing technologies to address and improve a myriad of complex problems and disparate networked product offerings
– Contributed to strategic decisions and prototyping projects related to retail spaces, digital authentication, financial planning tools, and large-scale data systems enhanced by emerging technologies, artificial intelligence [AI] and machine learning
Discovery
90 percent of all transactions are teller-based. A 26 percent reduction in traffic occurred pre-to-post pandemic. It costs roughly $1.5 million to set-up a new branch and $1 billion to move money within the branch network.
Customers don’t feel good about their money. Financial lives are complicated. Banking is intimidating. Thinking about the future is overwhelming. Bankers often feel disconnected. Too many responsibilities. Time constrained. A perceived lack of growth opportunities. Customers and Banker want to be together, virtually and physically. They need to feel real and valued.
Early in discovery, I began drafting design principles and a statement our initiative would soon anchor to: “The branch of the future isn’t a place.”
It was clear based on data and interviews, the next iteration of the branch wouldn’t be limited to a physical retail or ATM location. My design presentation deck for the initial design workshop opened with the familiar line: “The branch of the future isn’t a place,” adding on “It’s a connected experience of designed moments.” This shift moved the team away from how and where and why the branch functions the way it does today, and opened a door to think through specific moments we might design to offer unique experiences, holistically drafting how the bank must transform.
Design Artifacts
To stage an incremental advancement toward branch 2.0, the team needed to balance aspirational concepts requiring significant technological enablement with the reality of existing roadmaps and priorities across lines of business. Our concepts needed to be anchored in research and our prototypes were crucial to sharing these abstract concepts for feedback and buy-in.
Collaborating with the team, I developed Capsules, a new operating design architecture to solve disparate product offerings and customer experiences.
It orchestrates customer data and artificial intelligence enabling and generating end-to-end experiences across products and services. Based on research and extensive customer and banker interviews, Capsules organize around the human structuring scalable experiences, spaces, products and services respectively.
Once we discovered all related efforts across the enterprise, I created a series of views of customer journeys and operational flows representing what currently existed and where opportunities occured. The visual prototyping helped the team collectively understand process, product experience, technological enablers and a myriad of constraints to serve as a baseline for ideation.
Sketching and prototyping activities provided a collaborative setting to test and refine concepts, features and determine prioritization. I utilized Midjourney and several AI design tools to generate imagery to depict the many abstract concepts during and post design workshop. We completed 3 rounds of user testing using these stimuli and various iterations with extensive customer and banker interviews to support our shared vision. My prototypes evolved daily to meet the demands of these discussions with iterations ranging from sketches to high-fidelity clickable prototypes. Eventually, I delivered a production-ready component library for these concepts to extend to engineering teams for continued development.
