Project: Digital Banking

Digital banking is now ubiquitous, and has had a lot of iterations over the years in terms of usage patterns and customer expectations. However, not all banks and credit unions can develop and maintain their own banking applications. For such institutions, an easy solution is to use a white-labelled robust platform that provides all the features and banking needs their customers demand.

When I was lead designer at a fintech and banking services company, I was asked to design their digital banking product based on the pain points, learnings, and philosophies we thought were relevant to their customers. This case study is a recreation of what we wanted to achieve, plus a bit more.

Feature requirements

For banks and credit unions

There are financial institutions that have core banking ledgers but do not have online interfaces for their users.

Instead of having to invest in development of their own platforms, these institutions can use readily available white-labelled platforms that provide desktop and mobile banking experiences. That is what we wanted to provide.

Such a product would have to:

Easily connect to any banking core a bank may use
Provide desktop and mobile banking applications for their customers
Facilitate common banking processes like money movement and account management
Ensure security and data privacy
Be customizable to reflect each bank's branding identity
Allow third party integrations for partner services

For banking users

A digital banking app has to provide these features as a baseline:

Managing bank accounts
Moving money between one’s own accounts
Account-to-account transfers
Managing debit and credit cards

But beyond these basic features, there are a lot more that can and should be offered:

Instant third party transfers
Advanced card controls
Remote deposit of checks
Bill pay

…and a suite of additional offerings that may be dependent on third party providers.

Our bank app has to be a platform that offers these fundamental features and have the modular flexibility to integrate other features upon request.

What this design addresses

Over the course of developing the app, these were the groups of issues that customers reported or that we observed in their online banking usage:

Banking at a glance

Banking customers don’t spend a lot of time on their banking apps, and they want to be able to see pertinent information quickly and without having to go through menus.

The most common activities a user performs are:

Checking their account balance

Paying a bill or sending money

Going through recent transactions

These primary use cases are followed by a long tail of contextual or customer-specific banking activities.

The way this design addresses this pattern is to use an inverted pyramid information design, presenting the most relevant information up front, and then giving the user the choice to delve deeper.

Simplifying money movement

Traditional banking offers a medley of transfer infrastructures, built on legacy systems and protocols. Moving money becomes focused on transfer rails instead of the person you want to send money to.

Here are just some of the payment modes in use today:

Account-to-account

ACH, NEFT, ECS, SEPA, etc

Third party P2P

Zelle, Venmo, etc

Intrabank

direct internal settlement

Wire

domestic and international

These primary use cases are followed by a long tail of contextual or customer-specific banking activities.

The advent of new, centralized, instant-settlement payment infrastructures like UPI in India or FedNow in the US will soon account for the majority of low-value high-volume money movement. This means that payees will be addressable by simple, human-recognizable tokens rather than account numbers and routing numbers, and moving money becomes as simple as finding the right person in a list.

Enhanced card controls

With the increasing risk of credit card fraud, banking customers demand a suite of controls to ensure they can securely keep track of their card usage. Offering card controls gives users the assurance that they can monitor, limit, and manage their cards on the go, with immediate actions to mitigate the risk of misuse or risk.

Card controls include a seat of card management features:

Card freeze to mitigate fraud

Automatic payment options

Anytime PIN management

Linking to digital wallets

Card deactivation if lost / stolen

...as well as limits and restriction controls for card usage:

Setting spend and usage limits

Managing card usage modes

Restricting card usage by merchant type

Geolocation and travel usage limits

A banking app should have the facility to be able to integrate a provider of these features, and have a convenient interface for users to manage their cards.

Enabling customer self-help

Customer support is a vital area for a banking provider to address. In the current landscape, there are a lot of pain points, both for banking customers as well as for the banks themselves.

These are the typical issues customers face:

Difficulty finding contextual help

Long and complicated forms

No built-in tools to query their own data

Banks face their own set of issues:

High customer support call volumes and associated costs

Maintaining static resources like FAQs and visual guides

AI-integrated help

With the advent of LLMs, RAG models and chat interfaces, banking apps can now provide a unified assistant that can:

Answer questions and refer to visual guides
Assist the user with small, low consequence tasks, and
Offer a natural language query interface for the user to ask about their own banking activity

Omnichannel interfaces

Consistent experiences are important, across devices and viewports. This design is set up to be responsive to fulfill that requirement.

The full design file

Summing things up

A design for a banking app has to be so much more than features and screens.

A good design has to understand the needs of every banking customer, as well as their expectation for consistency, uptime, clear and unambiguous information, and the confidence that their money is safe and well-handled.

Additionally, a true implementation has to account for functional requirements such as security safeguards, user authentication and data protection, and having to rely on backend systems that may be old, performance-limited, or not designed for modern data pipelines.

My approach is to create an interface designed around all these factors, and ensure that form follows function, without compromising on experience.

Thanks for reading. Check out my other projects too.