C6 Bank – Building a bank from scratch

Taking a leap in the dark

I will never forget this question in my job interview:

“Do you want to build a bank from scratch?“

The interview was in an empty office. All lights were out except for the ones in the meeting room. The company consisted basically of the partners and a few employees.

Building something from scratch can be both demanding and exciting. At that moment of my career that was exactly what I was looking for.

I was the first designer to join the bank that still didn’t have a name, being designated as #TheNextBigFin. My challenge was to introduce UX & Product Strategy to executives from a very different universe: the banking industry. The idea was to merge people that could make money with people that could make great products, creating a collaborative and vibrant culture.

Vision workshops

We have started by facilitating a few vision workshops, in order to create a shared understanding and shared vision of the portfolio of products, like banking accounts, transfers, loans, credit cards, investment, and payment terminals.

With my previous experience facilitating design sprints and supported by the consultants from Bain Company, we’ve adjusted the activities to address these objectives.

Some of the activities were:

• Technical overview of the product/service
• “What would you ask your user?” followed by a live interview with customers
• Market Research and trends
• Pains, Gains & Jobs
• “How might we?“
• Ideation
• Voting

Digital Account Opening & Onboarding

Following that moment, I’ve taken responsibility for one of the most important stages of the user journey: the digital account opening & onboarding for both consumers and businesses. C6 Bank had the objective to deliver a fully digital banking experience, with no branches, and that would require customers to create their account inside the app.

In Brazil, there were 2 different types of bank accounts: basic (called payment account) and the full bank account (called 2025). To provide a full portfolio of services like C6 was proposing, the customer needed to open the full bank account, which requires a lot of fields to be filled in.

For business accounts, it was even more challenging as each partner of the company needed to provide information.

Flows

To get a full understanding of the onboarding process, we’ve spent a long time iterating the person and business flows. We’ve used these flows to facilitate meetings with several parts, like engineering, compliance, legal, and security. After each session, the flows were updated, the risks enumerated and then shared again with all stakeholders.

That helped everyone to get a good sense of what we were building and minimize business and feasibility risks.

The MVP

The first version of the onboarding was very straightforward and focused on the engineering side, to make sure the core banking process was working, and to enable beta users to be able to test the app. Following the mobile platforms best practices, we have made very simple screens to match a very tight time to market window.

One of the highlights for the user experience was the Contract Page. It explained in simple words each paragraph of the contract, bringing more transparency for the customer.

Post MVP: Onboarding using a Chat Interface

When we delivered the first version, we started to look for ways to create the best mobile experience for account opening. We knew that the onboarding was the most critical step for a branchless digital bank, where the user needs to provide all required information by themselves. One of the problems we found out was that the users felt the registration process was too long and tiresome. Some of the mandatory fields were hard for customers to understand. Also, it was not a memorable experience, as the founders were expecting to be. Some ideas came out but one, in particular, called our attention.

Most mobile users in Brazil are very used to social apps, WhatsApp in particular. That means they are very used to spend a long time on chat interfaces. Does it mean they could fill all the complex information to open a bank account using a chat interface?

The hypothesis had some risks, e.g. filling the fields as a conversation like “My name is John” instead of “John“. We decided to prototype the idea in a high fidelity prototype in Framer and did some usability testing with the aid of our UX researcher Paola Sasso.

The importance of copywriting

“Hello 😀. It’s so good to see you here. Let’s start your account creation process.“

Our UX writer, Aline Galvão, did tremendous work and conceived a very humane conversation. Some of the mandatory questions were tricky and we have worked really hard to find the best way to explain them.

The usage of emojis helped to create a friendly atmosphere, far apart from the branch experience, with tellers behind windows and bankers huddled in cubicles with desktop computers.

The result was promising. The feedback was positive, and users mentioned they felt the process was easy and fast.

To optimize the flow before going into development, we have made another prototype and did several rounds of testing to make sure we got the best copy. The prototype loaded a JSON file with the chat transcription so it was surprisingly easy to change and improve the copy.

We have also worked on the first time experience, where the user customises their products after account approval.

Going into production

The solution that we have built is not an actual chat conversation. For each question, we ask a specific sheet for reply appears. It can be a text input, currency input, decision, list or a customized full-screen modal view.

The elements of the page were refined and added to the components library:

Results

C6 Bank was the fastest-growing digital bank in Brazil. According to McKinsey, from all the 6 digital banks released between 2015 and 2019, C6 Bank was the fastest that reached the 1 million users mark. On June 2020, after a little more than 2 years from that job interview, C6 Bank reached 2 million customers.

The onboarding experience was recognized as the best from Brazil in 2019 by the company IDWall. The Onboarding Digital Experience Ranking conducted a study with 302 people to test 15 Brazilian bank apps, evaluating aspects like red tapes to open an account, services and taxes.

The C6 Bank app had the best Net Promoter Score after the test, and was chosen by most people when asked which bank would they change from their current one. The time to open the account was one of the fastest and with less red tapes.

Learnings

One of the biggest challenges to work for a bank is how the business is complex and how everything needs to be perfectly executed. Any bug or mistake could cause a loss of millions of dollars. The startup mindset to ship fast and fix on the way basically doesn’t work. Each new feature needs to pass an extensive workflow to minimize any risk before launching.

We had some learnings from the onboarding development process as well. It was really hard to keep all areas aligned, and some problems were just pointed out on the delivery stage, causing several re-works. In a hurry to ship fast we have skipped some stages and that had the opposite effect, delaying the launch.

Working as a strategy designer

From June 2019 on, I’ve started to work as a service/strategy designer. My job was to support teams on the discovery stage to create a clear and aligned vision of their products, analysing risks (business, value, usability and feasibility), jobs-to-be-done and user needs. It was a necessary work to reduce the chance of mistakes and I could contribute with the experience on the Onboarding process.

Some of the routines consisted on:

• Kick-off meeting to promote a shared understanding;
• Building assumptions worksheet (from Lean UX) with the team to learn product strengths and weaknesses;
• Facilitating breadboarding sessions;
• Building the flows;
• Estimating risks and strengths with all areas, divided into 3 segments: product (e.g. developers, business, product designers), risk (e.g compliance, security, legal), and communication (e.g. customer success, marketing, copywriters, performance)
• Organized and performed user interviews and testing with low fidelity prototypes to tackle value risks
• Definition of MVP and sequencing the features

Acknowledgments

Some of the members from the UX team that supported me on these projects:

• Gustavo Torres – Chief Innovation & Experience
• Marcel Sanches – Team Leader
• Murylo Schultais – Product Manager
• Barbara Dierckx – Product Manager
• Nathalia Ribeiro – Service Designer
• Paola Sasso – Research Designer
• Aline Galvão – UX Writer
• Bruno Poncinelli – Product Designer
• Iougo Huan – Product Designer
• Nando Roldan – Product Designer
• Rachel Pardo – Product Designer & Illustrator
• Bruno Fischer – Product Designer

I am really grateful for being part of this amazing project with some many great people. And yes, I’ve helped to create a bank from scratch! :)