Research for the development of digital banking and insurance products in new markets.
Project Background
I worked for a banking, investing, and insurance group with the goal of establishing a research and co-creation process for their new digital products to be launched in multiple Central American countries.
This task was difficult because Central America has the lowest digitalization rates in all of Latin America. It was crucial for us to keep this in mind while defining a better approach to deliver our products in this region.
Methodologies implemented
Research tools and processes
We first needed to establish research processes that would help us gather information about the environment effectively, especially since most of our team was not familiar with the region. Additionally, we needed to identify the tools we would use to collect customer data efficiently.
1
Macroanalysis, demographic analysis and benchmarking
I wanted to have a clear understanding of the social, economic, and political environment, especially having in mind that in this region we have some countries with strict regulations. This was necessary to comprehend the industry's situation in the region and identify the key players to focus on. Initially, I started with Central America and then expanded to LATAM and globally. This helped us gather information from similar contexts and key companies, which allowed us to provide context to our Product Owners. We aimed to identify the elements that could differentiate our products in this environment while leveraging the capabilities offered by the context.
​We gathered both qualitative and quantitative information from various secondary sources including publications from international organizations, government institutions market information databases, and official sites of recognized financial institutions and government bodies of their respective countries. Additionally, for benchmarking purposes, we utilized existing data from the aforementioned sources.
2
Getting to know our customers
After understanding our customers' environment and defining a research objective, our next step was to gain a deeper understanding of our current clients and their relationship with the traditional products they already owned. We aimed to understand their placement process, level of understanding of the product, the issues they faced with the product, the aspects of the product that stood out for them, their service experience and the improvements they would like to see in the product.
In order to gather initial findings and hypotheses about customer experience, a strategy was defined to conduct in-depth qualitative interviews with incentivized clients. Collaborators of the institution who handle traditional products were also interviewed to understand their experience and contrast the results. The findings from these interviews In order to gather initial findings and hypotheses about customer experience, a strategy was defined to conduct in-depth qualitative interviews with incentivized clients. Collaborators of the institution who handle traditional products will also be interviewed to understand their experience and contrast the results. The findings from these interviews were confirmed or discarded using a quantitative survey without customer incentives.
After launching the products and running them for two months, we conducted interviews with clients who completed the applications, clients who didn't complete the application process, and clients who were rejected for the product's opening. The purpose was to gather feedback and identify areas for improvement in the product. Based on these findings, we aimed to prioritize iterative increments to enhance the product.
Defining our user
To
After collecting our user's information, we created a detailed user persona using data from interviews, surveys, and database analysis. This persona helped us understand who our client was and what they were specifically looking for in the digital banking product. The user persona included both quantitative and qualitative data and was presented to the entire team responsible for developing the product. This helped them be clear about who their user is and what elements would help them make informed decisions while designing the product. We also delivered the main findings as User Stories, so they could be considered as incremental in their backlog.
This user persona is continuously evolving as new data is gathered during product investigations.
Co-creation
During the product discovery process or once we already had the products in production and were looking to improve the placement flow, but we already had the client and environment research completed, I was responsible for leading the co-creation workshops.
This space always requires a lot of creativity and having a clear objective to achieve.
To this end, it was carried out, involving the UX of the squads, from product attribute definition workshops, brand workshops, information architecture workshops, customer journey to be, among others to facilitate the following processes design of the UX team.
Documentation
Miro and Confluence have been both the main tools to document the research findings.
At Miro, I structured templates for delivering macroanalysis, demographic analysis, benchmarks, user personas, workshops, findings, and recommendations. We can create PDFs of the templates to send to stakeholders who can't access the platform.
At Confluence, I organized information by product, making it easier for product teams to access.
Our
Results
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In our first year, we delivered two products that exceeded the number of placements achieved through traditional channels.
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Additionally, the satisfaction rate of our placement processes remained at 4.6 out of 5.
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We identified two new entry markets and implemented recommendations to improve the conversion of our products in production, resulting in significant improvement.