Building the Gallantree Banking experience prototype
We believe that we are onto something truly unique, inspired and will be fundamentally different. As Steve Jobs said:
“Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.” — Steve Jobs.
It’s usually hyperbole when someone says a product “changes everything.” Banking products are often static things and the new banks or ‘neobanks’ have really just enabled better digital experiences on the same banking products that Wells Fargo or Barclays are pushing.
We believe that drawing on comprehensive data will enable intelligent decisioning to increase the wealth of customers through adaptive and dynamic core products is where our future lies.
Imagine if your bank could beat any pricing, offer contextual products and investment opportunities that provide a genuine solution/opportunity at that moment in time.
That is something that we believe people would actually change banks for. Designing a bank like this becomes more complicated when your products are dynamic, when the financial wellness of the customer is taken into consideration at every moment, therefore raw prototyping our design and validating with our core clients is going to be fundamentally different to any other bank out there. I thought I’d share our approach, our challenges and our way of thinking.
Step 1 — Who is the customer?
Our proposition and strategy can be viewed as something similar to Tesla on a few points. They started life in 2005 building an electric roadster that had the characteristics of being premium, sporty and innovative.
This car was ‘out of reach’ for most people, had mixed reviews against the competition. Yet during this time, a culture, a belief and an audience bought into the appeal.
The blueprint was created.
When they launched cars thereafter, they became a status symbol and a beacon for transformation and challenging the status quo.
Our customer appeal has been designed to be similar.
Everyone would like to be a millionaire or a billionaire, therefore we need to provide people who are or aspiring to be millionaires something that helps them achieve and maintain their wealth and continues to add value. For this experiment, my target segment is anyone from $100k — $1m in deposable capital and is classified as a sophisticated investor.
Step 2— What can we prototype that’s different?
Most banks prototype new onboarding flows or transaction processes and count ‘taps’ or ‘clicks’ to complete an ‘event’. We don’t want to re-invent these things and will assume that our stellar product team has the maturity to craft supreme hygiene features. I’ve picked something different to test which is: Showcasing investment opportunities that are contextual and presented to the customer.
Of note: I’m not here to debate whether this is the right first thing to test or unpack… I just need a starting point to begin with.
Step 3— What tools can and should I use?
This gets into a religious debate at times. Sketch vs XD. Figma vs Framer. Essentially I want to be able to design fast and test fast without a lot of coding or time on ‘setup’.
I’m working on a MacBook, therefore I’m going with:
Experiment Overview— Wines as an investment
One of the elements of the Bank is exclusive investment opportunities. Finding stocks is fairly vanilla, so the question of whether the target audience would be open for a bank to provide this isn’t a question I feel we need to unpack as it is common today, albeit often with multiple apps.
Wines as an investment is a rapidly growing industry. The chart below compares the Fine Wine Index against Gold and S&P 500. It’s certainly an investment that some of the expected client base would be interested in and there is something exclusive about purchasing wine as an investment in a private banking experience.
Lets start with some assumptions:
Here is our rough UX flow initial main page, to reviewing selected and contextual investment offers, reviewing the investment, transacting and updating the user’s portfolio with the investment.
I left out a few aspects that I think would be interesting to add including:
- Access to wine tasting events in the region.
- Access to wine auction events.
- Cellar storage and delivery.
Based on this, we did several mockups and a framer prototype. Here are some of the High-Fi designs in Sketch.
And we created a prototype of the flow in Framer.
Summary and next steps
During these early phases, we don’t just want to be able to test flows, but test whether our clients would be open to asset management within the app experience, particular around different asset types — like Wines and other luxury items.
Additionally, these sorts of assets are often overlooked by Banks as assets when looking at lending, so next would be seeing if the users assets can form part of the security for the lending products upfront or through the lifecycle of the product.
We’re interested in gathering feedback with this prototype so email us at info@gallantree.com.au with your feedback.
