Context

Following the collapse of the financial sector in 2008, and the emergence of discrete services for payments, money transfer, wealth management and so on, the financial industry has entered a period of disruptive unbundling.

Realising that the best way to tackle this was head on, Citibank TTS sought to implement a more innovative, agile and customer centric approach to product development and service delivery.

Solution

To do this, to take on a business redevelopment process of this scale, Citi realised they needed a design partner that could help them marry innovative thinking with the structure and politics of a large multinational.

Working with the VP of User Experience, we were hired to help them challenge their own business processes from within, and enable them to change their ways of working.

We began by conducting a review of their product strategy and delivery process, identifying the corporate issues, bottlenecks and deficiencies that resulted in poor customer experience.

Then we used these insights to lay down the strategy and blueprint for embedding UX and Design activities in the product lifecycle and formalising how teams should work on an ongoing basis.

The next stage was getting executive support to establish a Global (UX). Design Centre of Excellence. Based in Dublin, the centre is a cross functional campus of expertise, knowledge and innovation for creating software applications worldwide.

Design doing

A Design Centre such as this would be ineffective unless it provides practical guidance to product teams and positively influences how they work on a day to day basis.

To achieve this goal, we devised standard processes, methods, toolkits, pattern libraries and other elements to be shared with product teams. Some of the outputs are shown below.