The Challenge: Costly and Challenging to Comply
An investment services leader with over 14,000 locations had a vision to create a platform that would help their customers feel secure, on track with their financial goals, and in control of their financial futures. While previously focused on brick-and-mortar financial advising, their customer demographics are changing and demanding more options for self service across channels like web and mobile. Internally, they didn’t have the capabilities to build this product across the channels their customers use and sought help to bring this vision to life while giving them those skills moving forward.
Our Process: Human-Centered Design Agile
The financial services company partnered with 1904labs to help design and build a customer-facing product that enhances transparency, accessibility, and the customer experience. Leveraging our HCDAgile methodology, we worked with the client’s stakeholders to collaborate on the design of the product, improving usability and customer experience. Through close communication, our team helped identify and fill in gaps in the design, including areas like error handling and accessibility for those with disabilities. Frequent and continuous touchpoints with stakeholders across the organization helped establish trust, synergy between internal and external teams, ownership and investment in the final product, and assurance that the result included key features the end user would find most valuable.
We have an ambitious vision, and we’re getting there together.
- Senior IT Leader, Investment Services Firm
The Solution: Robust Native Web and Mobile App
The new app delivers four key areas of functionality to the client's customers:
- Site usability - modernized visual style, simplified navigation, and streamlined interactions that are consistent across all platform
- Connect with a branch - interacting with their advisor, sending documents, updating personal information
- Account monitoring - reporting on financial performance with more robust dashboards and comparisons to the market
- Goals and tools - goal setting tools, calculators, and what-if scenario tools to help predict outcomes in cases like change of retirement age
Leveraging REST services, we not only developed a best-in-class app but also helped the investment firm modernize current web properties to make them more scalable, intuitive, and extensible. Technologies were selected to enable easy maintenance and updates for the existing client team.
Throughout the project, by closely collaborating with the client teams, we also helped them transition to software best practices like Agile and CI/CD.
The Outcomes: New and Improved Customer Experience
Capabilities customers need
We delivered a robust native web and mobile application that allows the financial services company to better serve their customers. The new product provides new native capabilities across devices and browsers. It also includes extensive self-service capabilities that their more tech savvy customer base is demanding more and more. Released to over 800,000 users in less than 15 months, five million more users are expected to adopt the app in the next few months.
Modernized software development approaches
Internally, the investment services company is also experiencing benefits. Through the course of the project, they’ve been able to adopt new best practices for managing and building software in addition to more modern technologies. While legacy systems are still required, we helped them develop modern workarounds to still employ newer technologies and approaches.
