Project

Open Banking

Context

Company:

Itaú Unibanco

Employer:

BRQ

Role:

UX/UI designer

Workplace:

Remote

Overview

The Open Banking project emerged as an emerging demand from the Central Bank, which required the implementation of the LGPD (General Data Protection Regulation) in the financial sector throughout Brazil. This service allows customers to choose whether or not to share their banking data between financial institutions and which data they wish to share.

High level goals

01

Create a solution that meets the central bank’s demands in accordance with Open Banking standards based on the LGPD (General Data Protection Law)

02

Allow users greater control over what personal data they want to share with financial institutions and with which institutions they want to share it

03

Design the solution within 45 days, depending on the central bank’s needs. This will reserve another 45 days for the project development phase.

Initial Challenge

The challenge was to simultaneously understand users’ pain points and needs regarding the handling of their financial and personal data, while also addressing the specific requirements of the Central Bank, which aimed to enforce the LGPD across the entire financial sector. The goal was to design a solution that met both regulatory demands and user needs within the strict deadline set by the Central Bank. The project had a 45 day design deadline, but I was not alone — our client, Itaú, mobilized multiple design teams to deliver the solution.

Aproach

Due to the complexity of the problem presented, the project managers assigned a specific area to each team and a specific role to each designer to streamline the design process. I was assigned the Web/Desktop area, which focused on physical clients. Then, together with the design teams, the project leaders decided that we would adopt the Design Thinking method to design the solution.

The method

Discovery

Users needs

To identify customer pain points, qualitative research was conducted in the form of semi-structured interviews with customers from different segments of Itaú, 6 of which were physical clients from the retail segment.

Analysis of collected data

The main pain points founded:

Definition

Proto Personas

From the interviews we created proto-personas to facilitate understanding of the context of the problems to be solved.

Barbara Mello

Barbara is 26 years old, lives in Belo Horizonte – MG, has a boyfriend, works in sales at a startup and is studying marketing. Her time is extremely scarce because she has to divide it between: work, study, taking care of her cat, being with her boyfriend and taking care of household chores, as she lives alone. She enjoys and is comfortable with digital technologies, and intends to specialize in social media in another country after finishing college and for this she has meticulous financial planning. Although she currently does not have time for this, she seeks political and social awareness, thus having a skeptical and inquisitive mindset; which leads her to distrust large companies, including financial institutions.

Personal data

Age:

26 years old

Education

Studying marketing

Lives in:

Belo Horizonte – MG

Marital status:

Single (in a relationship)

Pains point

Profile

Digital technologies

unskilful

proficient

Trusting

skeptical

total trust

Emotional Balance

anxious/stressed

balanced

Free time

no time

unoccupied

Financial control

carefree

strict control

Manoel dos Santos

Manoel is 67 years old, lives in Rio de Janeiro – RJ, is a retired mailman, but currently works as a carpenter because his retirement pension is not enough to cover his expenses due to his wife’s expensive medicines and treatments; Manoel recently found out that she will need to have a very expensive surgery but Manoel and his wife does not have medical insurance or money saved. He is a practicing Catholic and believes that God is in control of everything, which leads him to not practice strict control of his finances, but he tends to believe in the goodness of people.

Personal data

Age:

73 years old

Education

High school

Lives in:

Rio de Janeiro – RJ

Marital status:

Married

Pains point

Profile

Digital technologies

unskilful

proficient

Trusting

skeptical

total trust

Emotional Balance

anxious/stressed

balanced

Free time

no time

unoccupied

Financial control

carefree

strict control

Values

Based on the defined personas and user pain points, we identify the values to be targeted:

Efficiency

Ease of use

Transparency

Security

Development

Design Sprint

Solution

Based on the wireframes defined during the Design Sprint, we immerse ourselves in a creation process under continuous alignment with managers to evolve the wireframe into a final solution.

Delivery

The prototype

First access

Open Banking Home

Data sharing details

Changing and renewing shared data

Data sharing end

Success screens

The result

Three months after the project was launched, the quality team, together with the UX researchers, conducted a Net Promoter Score assessment and a Structured Quantitative Survey to identify user satisfaction with their initial pain points. Since one of the main pain points for users was their lack of time, the quantitative survey was based on just three essential questions for evaluating the project:

Survey questions

How do you rate Itaú’s transparency in sharing your financial and personal data?

Rating

3.7

How do you rate how easy it was for you to use the digital technologies of Open Banking services?

Rating

4.4

How practical and efficient was it for you to use Open Banking services?

Rating

4.1

Survey total average

4.07

Net Promoter Score

Conclusion

The results indicate that user pain points have been mitigated to a satisfactory level, but further research into user pain points, especially regarding perceived transparency in user data sharing, will be needed to guide improvement actions in the near future.