Summary
Red Badger has been working with one of the world’s largest banks since 2016.
With products going live in the last year, the agency’s work is contributing to a
global efficiency target of £1.2bn.
The bank’s Originations and Utilities team identified that conversion rates on retail products were less than 5%. For the eligible customers, there were two key reasons. First, the bank’s customer-facing websites were limited in functionality due to inflexible technology and a lack of agility in the mainframe systems. The process required them to visit their local branch to complete a transaction.
The bank was working with dated technology, legacy systems and complex back office processes. It approached Red Badger to deliver a technology transformation programme. However, the scale of what was needed was
far larger. It needed to change its processes, build internal capability and put the customer at the heart of its digital strategy.
Objectives
The programme had to hit four key objectives, which were to deliver quality digital products to the bank’s customers quickly, improve the customer experience of opening a new current account and applying for a loan or credit card, help the team build internal capability and change the culture and reduce operational costs by increasing business efficiency. There was a need to change the way the bank worked.
Red Badger’s objective was to help the business move faster by creating more autonomy within the teams. It set about reducing their dependencies on shared platforms and pipelines, so that it could first create, and then scale.
Implementation, Execution & Tactics
Red Badger helped create the delivery plans for three product roadmaps that could be delivered by agile, cross-functional teams from start to finish.
Each team consisting of UX, Design, Engineering, QA and an Agile Delivery Lead became accountable for the on time launch of the product. The agency reduced each team’s dependencies on shared platforms and pipelines, so that they could be autonomous. By starting small and building live products, they could continuously test for accessibility.
Red Badger also created a solution that enables teams to deploy their microservice-based applications onto cloud provider agnostic ‘microplatforms’.
Teams can now create and destroy identical environments in minutes and manage their own deployments for testing and production. This means that teams can deliver continuously, whilst reducing the risk of failure and the mean time to recovery when failures occur, dramatically increasing velocity and speed of products to customers.
Results
The conversion rate on retail products increased from 5% to 72% following the implementation of the programme. It enabled the first straight-through
processed credit card product ever in the launch country, with the bank seeing 17,000 credit card applications (66% of which could be approved immediately). It also allowed digital customers to open an account with the bank in 10 minutes, and the bank could process 2,000 loan applications a week without manual intervention.
The bank has now expanded from one team in London to 26 teams in 10 countries. All teams were onboarded by Red Badger’s design, delivery and technical consultants. It could reduce its operational costs and increase
business efficiency with straight-through banking, a method that lets customers open an account online without having to visit a branch. The products used by branch staff reduced account opening time by 46%.
Awards
Red Badger was a BIMA Awards 2018 Finalist in the Transformation and Consultancy Impact Category.