Citizens Access (CAX) is a digital-only wing of Citizens Financial Group (CFG). Launching in 2017, the CAX model was a pilot for CFG’s a national banking strategy and vision for the bank’s digital transformation. In under 2 years, CAX accounts totals were valued over $1b and growing. With digital-only banking becoming a rapidly growing model, CFG invested in a robust platform upgrade to support an improved customer experience for CAX in 2019. This project would be called the Modern Banking Platform, and would include an authentication / security framework migration to support a more robust set of deposit products and  banking features. CFG was positioning itself for strong growth in the digital banking segment, and it would require more dynamic product offerings and seamless integration into native mobile applications to compete.

In late 2019 CAX partnered with Green Pixel Studios, and I was brought on to lead experience design for this digital transformation. With an ambitious go-live date on the horizon, I learned quickly that the existing experience would not suffice as a target for scope, as it suffered from numerous usability and accessibility issues, putting the bank at risk. After a brief discovery, I was able to identify and target 3 core areas of the legacy experience that would require deeper research and complete redesigns. Online account opening, mobile deposits, and account beneficiaries. After assessment and roadmap planning, I was successful in my pitch to allocate of additional funding, and had hired a small UX team of 3 researchers and 2 additional designers.

We faced our challenge to deliver an engaging experience that supported growth, retention, and reduced customer service engagement. The catch was that we had to maintain the CAX “look & feel” to avoid customer change-aversion, or heavy development overhead.

The sliding scale of design quality vs. delivery efficiency is tends to be a hot topic. During this engagement, we had the opportunity to lead workshops to educate our stakeholders on the value of UX and design quality. Through these workshops, we established a set of cohesive design principles to support both efficiency and quality, providing ownership and autonomy to the design team. Principles that supported our design mission of “Evolve, don’t change”.

I kicked off production by setting up and aligning the team around a cohesive delivery process. This ensured proper feedback was provided in a timely manner, and that designers would collaborate with development to ensure accuracy in production. I utilized tools such as Abstract to provide transparency into design specification for development. I kicked off the first few sprints as the sole designer on the project, working across both our Online Account Opening and Self Service pods. 2 additional designers were hired shortly into the second month, and were quick to ramp-up and embed into these pods.

Over the next 8 months, my team delivered the full-scale design evolution of Citizens Access. This consisted of over 400 screens, delivered in desktop-wide, desktop, tablet, and mobile screen sizes.