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Brief
Citi International Personal Bank (Citi IPB) is the offshore investment arm of Citi, one of the oldest and largest global financial organisations. It provides international wealth management expertise to high net worth and mass affluent clients across the world, who want access to investments and banking services outside their home country.
Citi IPB is highly profitable and has ambitious growth plans, and the website needed to adapt to keep pace with this.
In fact, the online experience offered to customers was deemed by the bank to be unsatisfactory compared to competitor websites. Moreover it was thought that continued use of the existing site could over time degrade customers’ perception of the brand, hampering the future ambitions of the business to increase its customer base and expand into new markets.
It needed a complete rebuild – copy, design, functionality; everything had to be brand new, first-class and able to support the growing business and its proposition. It also needed to support the extensive global branding work carried out by Citigroup, whilst creating a distinctive enough look and experience to differentiate the International Wealth Management services of Citi IPB from the onshore Retail Citi businesses around the world that provide first class domestic banking services
10 Business imperatives
Every aspect of the new website needed to be excellent but there were key business imperatives that needed to be adhered to throughout. These necessary challenges offered a starting point for us.
1. Stand out from the crowd
In a highly competitive market featuring some of the world’s largest banks standing out from the crowd to attract international prospects was vital.
2. Reflect users not the business
We needed to avoid ending up with a website that reflected the internal organisation of the institution rather than the user. Customers need to be able to access information quickly and easily, not think about where it might be.
3. Migrate to wealth management
A Citi IPB survey revealed the business need to move clients away from merely low value transactional banking to experience the potential benefits from international wealth management through the purchase of longer-term investment products.
4. Make the complex straightforward
Many of the bank’s client’s speak English as a second language and it was key that we explain complex financial concepts and products to them in a way they understood.
5. Be compliant
Everything had to meet the compliance requirements of statutory bodies like the Financial Services Authority and the Jersey Financial Services Commission.
6. Attract international prospects and maintain their interest
The site needed to be the shop window of the bank and had to appeal to prospects from around the world. Understanding clients’ diverse cultures, financial needs and their differing expectations would be essential.
7. Better information for existing clients
The copy on the website needed to be improved. It had to be high quality, consistent, and clear for the benefit of existing clients, whether they are doing day-to-day banking transactions or want to find out more about a wealth product.
8. What is offshore?
The new site needed to clearly outline the benefits of offshore banking to establish the point of difference between Citi IPB, its parent brand and competitors. A Citi IPB survey clearly showed that prospects and clients did not fully understand the relationship between Citi IPB and the local onshore Citi operations, or the nature of offshore wealth management.
9. We are the experts
The bank’s wealth management expertise needed to be shouted about. They are global leaders in this area, and prospects should know they are gaining access to vast expertise by joining the bank.
10. Speaking their language
All clients are allocated a dedicated Relationship Manager who speaks their language and shares their background, they often grew up in the same country and culture. This is something that had to be made clear throughout the site.
Strategy
An agile methodology
The first big decision OTM made was to deploy an ‘agile methodology’ in order to meet all of these complex challenges and deliver the project on time and on budget.
An agile methodology is a way to be flexible, adaptive and responsive while pushing through the project and hitting deadlines.
Developing a new financial services website for a global business makes demands on many departments and staff, and major practical and political decisions will be required throughout the project. Navigating the business through this can be daunting, but deploying an agile methodology allows the process to bend and flex when necessary.
Far from deviating from the web development plan, the agility of the methodology ensured that the Citi IPB website project remained on time and budget.
Challenging perceived wisdom
It was essential we research the business ourselves as a fresh perspective is always vital. This outside viewpoint provides clarity and often highlights important considerations. We needed to thoroughly understand Citi IPB, what it did well and not so well, and exactly who the clients and prospects are in order to shape the website.
Detailed mining of the Citi IPB client base was one of the first steps we took. The bank had a fair idea of who their clients were but it was revealing to dig deeper.
By challenging this perceived wisdom of the clients, their profiles and financial requirements, we began to build a picture of the users the site needed to be created for.
We built on this with exhaustive interviews with Relationship Managers and Business Development Managers at the bank. These are the people at the coalface of the business, who deal with clients day in, day out.
Execution
Personas
The information we had gathered enabled us to create draft personas of clients.
Personas represent the typical traits of user types. A key benefit of creating them is that they provide a consistent understanding of the audience groups by creating a human face that everybody involved in the project can easily identify with.
Our six draft personas were ranked by Citi IPB in order of priority by the business, giving us a great basis from which to work.
We then deployed a web methodology to closely match the personas to the tasks they wish to carry out within the new site and the Citi IPB business imperatives. In the highly competitive banking and investment market, user centric design like this allows diverse international clients to identify the investment products most appropriate to them.
Eliminate dead ends
All too often users get stuck in a website, unsure how to move forward, unable to easily link back to an appropriate page. It’s at this stage that they are lost and many never return. Making this user journey easy, effective and engaging was critical.
Intuitive navigation is achieved by thoroughly understanding the target market and walking through their probable and possible journeys on the website. What do they want to find out, need access to? It’s essential to include concise and effective Call to Actions (CTAs) and signposting to relevant areas of the website. Where to go next should always be clear and we ensured this was the case with each and every page of the site.
Copywriting required a specific tone of voice. As a global corporate the tone needed to be professional and authoritative but welcoming and jargon needed to be cut to the minimum. With many foreign language users clarity was of huge importance and the language had to be inclusive and straightforward.
At the same time, copy needed to be search engine optimised and specific keywords used.
Results
The website is now live at a new global URL www.ipb.citi.com to match the international nature of the bank and its clients.
•?Products and services are explained without jargon in clear simple language.
Each product is described in a consistent way - what it is, who it’s aimed at, how it
works and the benefits.
•?There is a clear focus on benefits and expertise. The website shouts about the things
Citi IPB is best at – namely global expertise in wealth management and the fact that
your relationship manager speaks your language.
•?There are no dead ends. The CTAs and signposting are clear and the application
process has been completely redesigned to be clear and simple.
•?Users can recognise themselves allowing for the targeting of specialised investment
products and services. This ‘usability’ can actively encourage investment product
purchasing – the dominant Citi IPB business strategy.
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