Virgin Money - 11:FS Pulse

Benchmarking digital financial services
Grab mobile app card screen
Virgin Money is a UK challenger financial services brand. It offers a range of services from current accounts, credit cards and business banking, through to savings, investments and mortgages. The Virgin Money UX team has used 11:FS Pulse to streamline the discovery and exploration phase of its design process.
The challenge

Virgin Money took an approach of manually looking at user journeys through personal accounts, combined with bespoke research projects and individual insight to drive their UX design process.

The UX team would build out presentations, outlining their plans for improvements and/or new features and functionalities to present back to stakeholders internally for approval.

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Using 11:FS Pulse

The team aimed to streamline the discovery and exploration phase of their design process, leading to more efficient delivery of proposal decks for internal stakeholders.

More importantly, 11:FS Pulse would allow the team to communicate their ideas more effectively, through the use of relevant examples as to how things can be improved and how that compares with the competition.

The key business objective of this work was to deliver ongoing improvements in customer satisfaction scores to help achieve the bank’s target of top 3 of the CMA Service Quality Index and deliver an increase in digital adoption rates.

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What we did
RBS Mettle mobile banking app and card
WeLab logo
US Retail Bank mobile app onboarding screen, dashboard, bills
CaixaBank logo
Meaningful results

“Virgin Money aims to deliver outstanding customer satisfaction and in order to do so, we need to drive effective and rapid customer-focused innovation. Pulse has enabled us to better understand the market and take inspiration from best-in-class design, allowing us to work smarter and faster.

Not only this, but as a UX Lead within a large FI, it can be difficult to communicate new ideas without examples and Pulse has made this quicker and easier than ever.”

Stuart Anderson - Head of UX, Digital Solutions at Virgin Money

The early signs indicate an increase in digital adoption rates.

Using 11:FS Pulse as a research tool within the discovery phase helped Virgin Money to quickly understand how a number of competitors solve similar challenges by showcasing what they do as part of the overall research strategy. This has seen the discovery phase time reduce on average by a week along with positive feedback on their research methods.

Mox payment card
GrabPay card
Meaningful results

“Virgin Money aims to deliver outstanding customer satisfaction and in order to do so, we need to drive effective and rapid customer-focused innovation. Pulse has enabled us to better understand the market and take inspiration from best-in-class design, allowing us to work smarter and faster.

Not only this, but as a UX Lead within a large FI, it can be difficult to communicate new ideas without examples and Pulse has made this quicker and easier than ever.”

Stuart Anderson - Head of UX, Digital Solutions at Virgin Money

The early signs indicate an increase in digital adoption rates.

Using 11:FS Pulse as a research tool within the discovery phase helped Virgin Money to quickly understand how a number of competitors solve similar challenges by showcasing what they do as part of the overall research strategy. This has seen the discovery phase time reduce on average by a week along with positive feedback on their research methods.

Citizens Access logo
Citizens Access logo
Mettle banking app transaction screen examples
Strategy phase: a customer-centric proposition

Following the Design phase, 11:FS worked with Citizens Access to define their strategy for the new proposition. This involved working through some rapid concept and user testing sessions to ensure the service design helped the customer overcome the problem identified in the JTBD analysis.

11:FS moderated workshops with the Citizens Access team to define the purpose of the new proposition, its core values and the tone of voice the brand should adopt. The outputs of these workshops were combined with the cultural insights to enrich the Stories to be Told and thus their product marketing and brand strategy.

We tested different ways the brand could pitch the new proposition and arrived at a compelling direction for the Citizens Access team.

Finally, leveraging 11:FS’ vast experience of getting digital banking products to market quickly, the team defined a Minimum Loveable Product (MLP) prototype, roadmap and set of execution principles. This left the Citizens Access team with a clear direction on how to design a new breakthrough proposition and get that into the hands of their customers quickly.

GrabPay mobile app card screen
GrabPay: Southeast Asia’s leading digital wallet

Taking the 11:FS findings and ideas to the core of the offering, Grab set about building the app. In December 2019, it announced the launch of its Grab Pay Mastercard that sits at the core of its super app.

The GrabPay Mastercard is a significant step in Grab Financial’s strategic vision. It is the region’s first numberless card with access to an expanded rewards network and seamless Grab payments integration. It allows users, regardless of whether they have a bank account, to transact securely and easily online or offline, at nearly 53m merchants worldwide that accept Mastercard cards.

As an extension of the GrabPay wallet, it is highly secure with card details stored securely within the Grab app. It also has an in-app lock card function that is PIN-protected, allowing users to instantly suspend payments for lost cards.

Where super app’s go from here is only going to get more interesting. With Singapore and Malaysia both announcing their own Virtual Banking licences, the big tech companies from Asia are well placed to help the most underserved and over charged in ways that traditional banks can’t.

We’re proud to have played a major part in those developments through our collaboration with GrabPay on the launch it’s Mastercard.

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