A living bank
Distinctive 'Life-centric' super app strategy and its key screen designs
Design consulting
Design lead
Design leadership, Interaction design, visual design
Impact
Our efforts successfully secured funding from LG CNS’s Digital Finance (DF) department to develop a life-centric banking service offering. This strategic collaboration led to a $20 million investment, enabling further organizational upskilling and capacity-building initiatives. Internally, the project was recognized as one of the best projects at Accenture Song APAC in 2022.
Design challenge
The requirements of this project were mainly two parts.
Build LG CNS' design capability
My honest reaction:
They are the famous designers in Korea. Some are a lot more experienced than us. I struggled a lot with impostor syndrome and have worried about the project repeatedly.
"How can we truly build a capability?"
Super app for banking clients in Korea
My honest reaction:
"No more super app, please…"
However, the design constraint was received. Now, the question was how to design an innovative super app strategy that doesn't just add more features.
Approach — capability building
Service design academy
Throughout 4 weeks intensive service design academy courses with a personalised playbook delivery, the LG CNS design team honed the essential service design skills from designing research activities to generating research insights.
Learnings
The Service Design Academy successfully introduced the LG team to rich and novel service design knowledge that they hadn’t encountered before, which the client appreciated.
However, we learned that simply sharing knowledge wasn’t enough to fully engage the team or enable them to immediately apply it to their practice. This required us to adjust our approach to build their capabilities to use in their practice immediately and better develop their capabilities so that they could use them.
Joint Design Studio
We quickly reflected on what we had learned and boldly pivoted—shifting from an academy concept to a collaborative, joint design studio model. This change wasn’t easy, but we went beyond the traditional client-consultant relationship to become a unified team.
Joint design studio pitch
Through collaborative service and UX design activities, we co-created a UX playbook and developed a unique banking app strategy.
Our seamless teamwork led to a successful pitch that secured funding from the Digital Finance team, allowing us to co-create a distinctive offering for Korea’s external banking clients. By sharing knowledge and working side by side, we not only delivered a compelling solution but also empowered LG CNS to sustain and grow their design capabilities independently.
(left) Discussion on the super app strategy
(right) The designer from LG CNS explains the concept poster of the interaction model that they learned during the design studio project.
Approach — super app strategy
Life-centric super app strategy
"Korean customers tend to stay with one bank for a lifetime as their primary account. Life stages change, but why does the bank remain the same?"
We began by exploring this important question. By examining various life stages and identifying the significant moments that matter, financial services can enhance the customer experience for current customers and possibly attract new and unexpected customers.
Framework demonstrating the different life stages of Korean banking customers and the key moments matter the most. The size/color of each circle represents the importance of each moment.
Design
Design 02
Experience principles
Interactive framework that connects to the UX design solutions
Interaction model example — Accordion
'The accordion' interaction supports to provide life stage relevant experience and contents with a scalable manner.
Service offering deck
The joint team developed a Living Bank offering and that was resulted in successfully securing funding from LG CNS’s Digital Finance (DF).
Reflection
The power of co-creation lies in shared ownership.
One team
The Accenture team, the LG CNS team, and even the buyer of the offering (Digital Finance department) were captured with excitement about the successful project closure.
P.S. I got approval from the team to share this photo publicly :)
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