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Data Aggregation | Analytics | AI 

Building a virtual Chief Operating Officer

From Proof of Concept to implemented product, this project addresses the challenges of small businesses and exploring how they might be met with new, innovative solutions from the bank. 

Company: Temenos
Client: Canadian Western Bank

Role: UX Lead | Design Sprints | Videography | Motion Graphics 

Location:
Edmonton, CA | London, UK

For this project Canadian Western Bank (CWB) won the 2022 Impact Award in Cash Management and Payments from Aite-Novarica Group, a global advisory firm providing mission-critical insights on technology, regulations, strategy, and operations to the financial services industry. CWB’s Virtual Chief Operating Officer (Virtual COO) garnered the award in the Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Analytics category. 

Source: Financal Times – Read the Article

The Goal

Reinventing Business Banking for small businesses and enabling the bank to become the bank for life by earning the trust of businesses from early stages of growth.

The Challenge

How might we envision a uniquely valuable COO experience to address the real world operational challenges of a growth focused SME, and become their most relevant, trusted business partner?

Project Background

In March 2020 the CWB Innovation Proof of Concept kicked off in Edmonton, Alberta. This project was dedicated to addressing the challenges of small businesses and exploring how they might be met with new, innovative solutions from the bank.

CWB is seeking to explore how Temenos can support them to design and build a market leading Virtual COO tool for SMEs*.

The project can be split into two chapters:
Developing a Proof of Concept  – 2020
Productisation, Implementation and Launch – 2021-2022

*SME: Small and Medium Enterprise

From Concept to Product

Proof of an idea

Innovation that explores a new idea that solves an often unmet and unidentified need, whilst realising business value and is ultimately technically feasible

Proof of Transformation

Goal is to identify transformative use cases that go beyond incremental product change and product fixes. Explore new ground – new market opportunities and new product / services.

Proof of a method

Collaborate to create new capability proving customer desirability, business viability and technical feasibility thus reducing ‘go to market’ risk.

Methodology: Design Thinking + Agile

Using human-centred design to foster greater creativity and innovation, reduce go-to-market risk and focus decision-making.

Project Overview Video

Recorded and edited a video with motion graphics to capture the project and the design process (using Premiere Pro and After Effects). A professional voiceover was added to deliver a narrative.

PHASE ONE

Discover

Market Research and Competitive Analysis

Before the project kicked off we ran a general assessment of business customer needs, identified challenges faced by SMEs, the self-employed and gig economy workers, and analysed prominent Canadian bank offerings as well as distruptor and startup innovators in the industry in an 11 page Research and Analysis report.

The research also included posting questions on forums and Reddit to gather insights from existing users. 

Stakeholder Interviews

Interviewed 10 bank Stakeholders collecting their input on goals, risks, strategy and what success of this effort means.

Unpacked and synthesized the interview results
• Identified common themes and insights
• Defined Goals, Risks and Success
• Integrated Stakeholder direction into the project

User Interviews

Interviewed 18 small business owners representing various industries and business models (single proprietors, family businesses, multi portfolio owners, franchises) to gain an understanding of their operational challenges, motivations and visions for growth.

1. Unpacked and shared the results of each interview
2. Consolidated the results looking for both common themes and unique compelling outliers
3. Identified the key SME characteristics – daily pain points, systemic obstacles, success measures, motivations and technology savvy
4. Defined SME personas reflecting the predominant and compelling characteristics across all categories
5. Created a Problem Statement to drive our solution ideation and the vision

User Insights

My bank helped at the start and I’ll never leave them!

What I want is a single solution vs. many disparate technologies that I must learn and manually connect. My curren

SMEs need resources and
funding when starting out,
but Banks don’t care

Now grown to a stage that banks take interest, but it’s too late –“I don’t trust banks”

Still not meeting the bank’s criteria for help

Slowly growing, not recognized or helped by banks, they seek alternative sources for advice and funding

PHASE TWO

Define

The Problem

We found the SME sector is one that believes Banks are irrelevant to their early stage growth, that Banks really don’t understand nor care about their businesses. Small businesses feel banks are irrelevant BECAUSE small businesses are irrelevant to banks.

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Time

I spend the majority of my time on operational administration – help me save time and manage risk

U

View

Lack of a cohesive view – Help me see the full picture of my cash flow and business operations

p

Support

Lack of real support from the bank. My bank doesn’t know enough about my business to help me run it. 

Funding

Having access to sufficient funds when and how I need them, and knowing when and at what pace to invest in growth.

Care

The Banks just don’t care or understand us – be on our side. The bank that helps me from the start will be my bank for life.

Problem Statement

Gordon, a furniture design entrepreneur with loyal employees,
feels overwhelmed with admin, as well as unsure and intimidated about how to run his operation more efficiently to grow his products and business,
needs to gain business acumen, operational confidence, and help with strategic direction,
because if he grows too fast or the wrong way he will lose the quality in his products and risk sacrificing culture for the price of growth.

Persona

Crafted an SME persona that reflects those characteristics we found most prevalent in our target SME.

PHASE THREE

Ideate

Solution Ideation

Using the SME Problem Statement as inspiration, we initiated Solution Ideation in our virtual collaboration space. Over the course of 12 virtual sessions we:

Generated 272 solution ideas, forming the basis of our “Backlog of Ideas”

Evaluated the ideas and narrowed to 16 solution categories

Created a narrative description for each category

Prioritized the categories and defined a Virtual COO Experience Vision

Crafted a narrative of a single user journey for our SME Persona, Gordon, illustrating high value capabilities of the Vision

Detailed the SME journey step by step

Defined a set of Experience Design Principles to be applied to the IPOC design

Transitioned the SME Journey Narrative, step by step Journey details, and Design Principles to the Design Team to initiate the creation of a clickable prototype

How Might We?

Generated hundreds of How Might We statements which where then evaluated into solution categories through voting and prioritising.

Key Capabilities

Ideas narrowed down into solution categories, answering 3 SME foundational questions.

Design Principles

Defined the following principles to guide the design of the Innovation PoC solution experience.

Defining Key Capabilities

Smart Dashboard

A real time view of ‘business health’ aggregating and integrating multiple data sources to deliver a relevant, timely and complete picture of business operations.

Actionable Insights

Creating order and meaning from data to deliver a useful diagnosis of business activities helping business owners to understand what’s happened and why, and enabling the next best action.

Predictive Modeling

Engaging the collective power of machine and industry intelligence to educate business owners to various options for addressing opportunities, and prescribe a recommendation.

Simulation

Enabling human AI augmentation by allowing business owners to visualize alternate outcomes and perform ‘what if’ analysis off of the AI models presented, empowering them to make informed choices for their business.

Automation

Enabling the system to learn and run predictable, repetitive aspects of the operation such as funding decisions, with control parameters set by the owner freeing them to spend time growing their business instead of running it.

Track & Trigger

The automated monitoring of information and channels to identify and alert business owners to opportunities or risks for their timely attention, serving as a ‘real time business coach’.

Eco system Synergy

Exposing industry collaboration opportunities for the SME and bank.

Story & Customer Journey

From the SME Experience Vision a single narrative and journey was designed to illustrate in the key solution capabilities envisioned.

PHASE FOUR

Prototype

PRIMARY TOOLS

Figma | Sketch | Mural | InVision

MY ROLES

UX and Design Sprint Lead | UI Design | Project Management

THE TEAM

Core Team and Client | 5 Designers | Data Scientists (AI) | Developers

User Journeys and Scenarios

Sketches and Wireframes

The Prototype – Proof of Concept

This version was used for proving the concept and was validated with customers through user testing. I made this video to walk through the features and the screens.

PHASE FIVE

Validate

Testing the Concept

Both Figma and Mural were utilized to support design iterations and capture feedback. The completed Clickable Prototype was tested with SMEs during User Validation.

What did users say?

PRODUCT IMPLEMENTATION

The Final Product

Summary

Following the success of the Proof of Concept we started a 6 month long journey to implement the product into the bank’s system for beta testing and final release.

1200 ARTBOARDS

400 SCREENS DELIVERED

HUNDREDS OF CUPS OF COFFEE

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100+ INTERNAL DISCUSSIONS

TOO MANY MEETINGS ABOUT DONUT CHARTS

210 USER TESTS

36 DESIGN REVIEWS

COUNTLESS CURSE WORDS FOR SKETCH BEING SLOW

Branding and Style Guide

Final Implemented Screens

Smart Dashboard Unbranded Example

Dashboard features

Landing Page

Introducing Virtual COO

Onboarding and Data Connection

Data Crunching

Business Health Score

Profile

Action Plans

Plan Preview

Automation

Knowledgebase

Learn