Beyond Swipes & Scrolls: What Banking UX Can Learn from the Best Digital Experiences

Caroline Béguin: Shalien, you lead product design at SBS. What does that look like day to day, and how does design influence the banking experience? 

Shalien Kishore: Design impacts everything. When we’re talking about an end customer who doesn’t understand the bank’s products, we want them to be guided by our products to enable them to use the bank’s products. Similarly, the bankers are the ones who are enabling customers to understand the bank’s products and offer to them something which is tailored for them. And then at the end of day, for people like you and me who are building bank products, we have to understand the end-to-end picture, right from the customer’s engagement to the banker’s experiences, to the dashboarding for aggregated data as well. So yes, design impacts everything, including banking. 

Caroline Béguin: What’s the digital experience that truly impressed you in terms of usability? 

Shalien Kishore: Before I answer that question, I want to first explain usability and usage in the context of banking. So banks use customers’ data and the bank’s data to build understanding of a situation and to create meaningful experiences for banks customers as well as bankers. All of that is done to enable them to perform some very complex activities and to perform them efficiently without error. At a granular level, it is about giving the exact amount of information needed to take an action. And Google Search did that first, many years ago. Just one large search bar in the middle of a screen where you could search anything on the internet. They did the same a few years later with Google Maps. There’s a map of your current location and a search bar to find any location on the world map. And then later, Uber took the simple user experience to the next level. It shows a search bar to your destination, and there are shortcuts for your recent destinations. Once you select the desired location that you want to go to, it gives you the different types of taxis and vehicles available and their price. You choose one, and the booking is done. All the complexity of just-in-time demand and supply, fleet management, driver route alignment, pricing calculations, including surges, all the mapping, all the configurations are happening behind the scenes. But the end customer’s experience is made super simple, and that’s the level of simplicity we aim for in banking interactions. 

Caroline Béguin: And what’s the trend in UX that makes no sense in banking? 

Shalien Kishore: Banking experiences are utilitarian and mostly action-oriented. No one wants to engage with their bank just like that. We approach banks both digitally and physically in person when we really have something to do. It could be a money transfer. It could be to see how much you’re spending or purchasing something with your money or borrowing money to purchase something large, big. So any trend that is promoting frequent engagement, like hooks on social media and entertainment, that would do more harm than good. On the other hand, when we’re not actively engaging with our bank, we are still banking on them to keep our money safe and available to us whenever we need it. So any trend that trivializes or downplays content like a continuous customer feed, that will not sit well with bank’s customers or bankers. Instead, we should go after the trends that showcase sincerity, authenticity, commitment. And examples could be finfluencers or edutainment. That is, giving insights via storytelling, using everyday life as examples and relatable characters.

Caroline Béguin: That brings us to a bigger question. If we strip away the gimmicks, what actually makes a digital experience feel effortless? Because while banking doesn’t need viral features, it can learn a lot from the apps that have nailed smooth, intuitive design. So for example, Tesla does not entertain you, it removes friction. How can banking do the same?

Shalien Kishore: I’ll begin with the topic of making banking experiences effortless. And for that, we first need to understand that banking is a serious business. It deals with all the money that people are saving, transacting with, or borrowing, and it has a huge importance, value, and impact on our lives. Due to that very reason, banking has friction and effort by design so that we don’t accidentally do something that we don’t intend to do because there’s money, real money involved. So I would argue that even though we can’t make banking effortless, we can still make it feel effortless to the end customer, and we can do that by using smart systems in the background, by providing feature-rich applications that are easy to navigate, easy to use. And all of that has to be done while staying fully focused on the customer’s emotional and financial behaviors. And about your second point regarding the streamlining of financial decisions, I agree that banking experiences need to become helpful without being annoying, and that is easier said than done because of the compliances with strict regulations around data that the banks hold. As a solution, in short term, financial decisions have to be user-prompted. It could be via search or via chatbot, but it has to be a guided discovery. That way, banks can provide a smart and personalized level of recommendations based on users’ queries and their current financial situation. And over time, as users become comfortable with such digital exchanges, banks can start prompting customers proactively with real-time financial solutioning or with products and services tailored to upcoming financial milestones. It could be some large payment that is coming, taxes, subscriptions, budgeting, even retirement planning. So to summarize, the focus of banks of the future should be to enable customers’ financial well-being. It has to be done utilizing the best in technology, and banks need to keep evolving as the customer expectations and their comfort with technology evolves. 

Caroline Béguin: Another example from the best digital experiences is Tinder, and it’s not about swiping, it’s about reducing decision fatigue. What can banks do to streamline financial decisions without adding gimmicks? 

Shalien Kishore: These would be, again, making things more guided, more personalized, and based on the data that banks hold for the customer, we can anticipate their upcoming needs. All of that has to be done by being mindful of the customer, whether they are financially savvy, whether they are tech-savvy, where they are in their financial journey, in their life stage, in their age, and that is how we’ll be able to help them without making them alarmed or making them impacted. 

Caroline Béguin: If we look at Spotify, it doesn’t just play music, it anticipates what you want to hear. How can banks personalize financial insights in a way that feels just as natural? 

Shalien Kishore: It has to be by understanding the interests of a customer. So what is the age of a customer, age group, age band? What are their current engagements or contracts with the bank? And based on that, where are the possibilities of optimizing for their spends, their future requirements, as well as something that they are not yet anticipating, but looking at the data we can anticipate? 

Caroline Béguin: So we’ve seen how great design removes friction and makes things feel easy. But when it comes to banking, there’s more at stake than convenience. Trust, privacy, and control, they all play a huge role. So let’s talk about what banks can learn from these effortless experiences without crossing the line or losing the customer’s trust. So instead of talking about entertainment, let’s wonder how banks can give helpful personal tips without feeling too intrusive? 

Shalien Kishore: Absolutely. Banks can deliver contextually relevant content and communication for upcoming financial milestones, as I talked about. So when we look at user experience, it’s more than just the design of the product. It’s about an integrated set of experiences for the user, from browsing an online banking interface to interacting with a physical branch office for savings, mortgages, et cetera. It could also be taking advantage of services like an ATM or bill payments or an online auto debit. All of that combines to form user experience in, in an omni-channel format. So the job of UX design is to solve a user problem or fulfill a user need in a way that requires the least amount of cognitive effort. And we technically call it user-centered design, but it’s not a one-time event. It’s an ongoing journey. So at each stage of that journey, the customer is adapting to what they know. They’re improving their financial know-how, their technical know-how, their understanding and comfort with a certain bank, and that is where we can keep adding new capabilities over time as the expectations are changing in a continuously evolving fashion. We can do that via all distribution channels, branches, phones, online. But when we’re talking about personalization, we have to make sure that we keep the interest of the customer first. 

Caroline Béguin: A lot of financial choices can feel tricky, like deciding whether to invest in a retirement fund or paying off high interest debt. How can design make these decisions easier to handle? 

Shalien Kishore: So banks have data, and we can use algorithms to analyze customers’ data and make personalized credit decisions, for example. We could offer a higher credit limit to low-risk customers. Banks can also match the customers with the most appropriate products, most appropriate advisors for their needs, and it could create a more proactive customer service experience rather than the reactive one. So when we talk about guided decision-making, it still has to be data-driven, but it also has to be very, very context-driven, context of the customer themselves.

Caroline Béguin: How can banks use smart features to help people without making them feel like they’re losing control of their money? 

Shalien Kishore: So again, for the customer, we understand their purchase history, their browsing behavior. Based on that, we can give or guide users towards specific products and services and try to create a win-win situation for the customer as well as the bank. But while we’re anticipating needs, we have to be very conscious that we cannot overburden them with a lot of communication, because in the end, financial literacy is still not so advanced or not so mature in most geographies. So we want our customers to be comfortable first, and we have to kind of handhold them into accepting more and more of what we’re doing in terms of advancements in technology. 

Caroline Béguin: So we’ve talked about what good design in banking should look like: clear, helpful, and built on trust. Now let’s have a little fun. I’m gonna throw out some UX ideas inspired by other industries, and you tell me steal or skip, meaning could this actually work in banking, or is it better left outside? 

Shalien Kishore: Done. 

Caroline Béguin: A Spotify Wrapped for your spending habits, steal or skip? 

Shalien Kishore: Definitely steal. Personalize, and especially if it is hyper-personalization, my own spending habits, definitely. 

Caroline Béguin: What about push notifications for trending financial products like hot stocks or credit cards? 

Shalien Kishore: Steal with caution because the customer might get bombarded with things they’re not looking for, and that would scare them. So look at where your customer is in their financial game, and then give them that point. 

Caroline Béguin: What do you think of smart reminders based on real-time financial behavior? Steal or skip? 

Shalien Kishore: Steal. Steal, for sure. 

Caroline Béguin: You might like a recommendation feed for financial services. 

Shalien Kishore: Skip that. Too much for them. Too much for most people. 

Caroline Béguin: Swipe to approve for transactions or account changes, just like Tinder. 

Shalien Kishore: If it’s on mobile phone, definitely take it up, steal. But if I’m using some other device, don’t. 

Caroline Béguin: Dark mode for banking apps. 

Shalien Kishore: If it’s a mobile app, steal. If it’s a web app, don’t. Just skip. 

Caroline Béguin: Now let’s take a step back and look ahead. We’ve seen how UX is evolving in other industries, but where does banking go from here? What should banks be focusing on right now to improve their user experience? 

Shalien Kishore: Make onboarding as seamless as fintech apps. So for an account set up, instead of the lengthy sign-up forms that require excessive manual inputs up front, use autofill. We have ID scans. We have pre-verified data sources that we could use, or digital identity frameworks to get people onboarded without much friction. 

Caroline Béguin: What’s a UX misconception about banking that you want to correct? 

Shalien Kishore: So many banks think that more the security steps, the better the security. So they overload users with extra passwords, one-time passwords for every action, CAPTCHAs, security questions, thinking that it will improve security. But in reality, that frustrates users, and it encourages insecure behavior like writing down passwords or reusing weak ones. So instead, banks should enable smart authentication based on the risk usage. It could be biometrics. It could be behavioral analytics. It could even be this device intelligence, so using adaptive security and only prompting for extra verification when there is some unusual behavior, like a new device or a foreign IP there. 

Caroline Béguin: Now, I’d like to hear a bold prediction. What will banking interfaces look like in five years? 

Shalien Kishore: This will go two ways. So most of our day-to-day banking activities are going to get embedded and integrated into everyday apps, so it could be platforms like WhatsApp or iMessage. It could also be integrated into lifestyle products like super apps or large platforms like WeChat Global, or, and this could be done for payments, for investing, insurance. So this is the day-to-day banking activities. And when we really interact with the actual bank, it will be more of a conversational and voice-first interface in natural language. So it could be prompted by users, like, “Can you increase my credit limit?” Or, “Are all my bills paid for this month?” Or the bank AI could highlight important financial insights, and they could do it proactively. For example, “Your broadband bill is higher this month. Would you like to review it?” Or, “You have extra cash sitting idle. Do you wanna invest in it?” And these insights would be, again, very hyper-personalized and predictive based on each few, each user’s financial habits and behavior. 

Caroline Béguin: To wrap up this podcast, I’d like to know what excites you most about designing for financial products. 

Shalien Kishore: The very fact that more and more things which are repetitive, which are mundane, will get automated. We don’t have to think actively all the time about what my money is doing and why. All of that could become in the background, and I only get to load myself with active financial decisions when there’s something really big upcoming, and that excites me. So making the frequent things and repetitive things almost invisible, and the big things that I really look forward to making those easy, and that’s what the power comes with working on banking UX experience.

Caroline Béguin: Thank you so much, Shalien, for the insights into how design can make banking more intuitive, personal, and trust-building. We have explored how UX can simplify financial decisions, what banks can learn from other industries, and where banking might be headed in the future. So a huge thank you for sharing your expertise and to all our listeners for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to FinTrends for more discussions on the latest in finance and tech. And until next time, keep designing the future of banking. 

Shalien Kishore: Thank you, Caroline. Wonderful talking to you.