Large holdings and corporations see digital transformation as a key resource for development. They expect banking services to match their level of digitization and seamlessly integrate into their processes. This poses a significant challenge for corporate ecosystems of banks since they serve employees with different business roles, requiring a well-thought-out user experience for all.
When our client faced this, we helped to find its position in the market landscape. But the project soon exceeded the scope of competitive analysis, as the researchers became involved in the multi-stage process of creating a digital ecosystem for holdings and corporations.
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Cabinet audit revealed growth areas from a market perspective. We gained access to 17 banking services, and separately evaluated onboarding and platform features, such as cross-notification settings.
We studied tasks related to complex processes and currency transactions together with the bank's product managers. The rest were conducted independently: creating documents, sending payments, signing invoices, ordering statements, opening products, and interacting with support through chat.
We conducted interviews with employees from 13 major corporate clients, identified the peculiarities of user experience in different positions, and identified strengths and key areas for growth. We spoke with heads of financial departments and treasury, as well as with operational staff responsible for specific areas of work: payments, cash management, fund placement, payroll disbursement, and currency control.
Integration with an ERP system and deposit and NSS placement were implemented better than other digital services. Currency control, acquiring, and cash collection were on par with the market's competitive level, but the digitization of financing capabilities proved insufficient. Applying for credit, overdraft, factoring services, as well as online loan repayment and managing tranches within a credit line could only be done through a manager.
1. Consistency in management tools
The business user experience can vary significantly for different tasks, which can impact the overall ecosystem experience. Therefore, researchers recommended focusing on the development of structuring solutions: a unified knowledge base, a centralized notification configuration center for all services, management dashboards with consolidated statistics, and integrated online chat.
2. Role model
Delegate access configuration and the addition of new roles and employees to clients. Prior to the project, role changes and user additions were done manually, requiring customers to submit requests to the bank administrator, which hindered processes for the client. Role management is a key indicator of digital maturity for a large business service.
3. Quality of digital cash management services
Cash management is a crucial banking product for most AAA sector clients. To become a leader, it is necessary to offer interfaces that consider market best practices, such as digital tariff management, online access to account details, customer notification of errors and account blocks, online ordering of statements, and full-text search capabilities for transaction history.
4. Digital acquiring
At the time of the research, no bank offered digital management of receiving payments from individuals or ordering acquiring equipment. Our client raised the priority of this task and soon implemented a service for ordering equipment online.
5. Online loan approvals
Our client made digital management of existing loans and credit lines possible, including viewing parameters, payment schedules, tranche lists, credit line limits, overdraft status, and amounts. This is a hallmark of leadership in the corporate segment.
These recommendations played a structuring role in the development of the digital service as a platform. Their implementation helped the bank initially create a convenient basic environment for customers and subsequently improve niche functions.
6. Communication with the bank
Accountants and managers involved in treasury functions often require clear feedback on whether a process has been initiated correctly, whether there are any errors or issues, and whether their request has been approved. Currently, they have to call the bank to obtain this information, whereas it would be sufficient to have a visible status update in the interface or an automatic message.
The built-in chat in the internet banking interface allows for convenient storage of communication history, documents, agreements, links to relevant functions, and the ability to send screenshots of errors, among other things. It can replace phone calls and streamline support for users who do not have direct access to personal managers.
7. Timely error notifications
Corporate clients who use various BI and KPI solutions to aggregate data across multiple banks do not require financial statistics and analytics on the bank's dashboard. However, the dashboard is still needed: accountants or finance department specialists want to use it to see the status of processes and proactively address any issues.
The research has defined the vector of development for corporate services. The ecosystem's coverage increases. New products in the corporate ecosystem immediately face high demand: the volume of daily operations with electronic documents increased by tens of percent, the number of currency exchange requests and issued corporate cards also increased.
Today, more than 160,000 employees of companies with turnovers of over 400 million rubles per year use this corporate digital service.
Expanding corporate service ecosystem presents an important task for service developers: to ensure an equally high level of customer experience for each business user as the number of products in the ecosystem grows. New waves of UX research are already being explored in niche products within the ecosystem.
This case study demonstrates a strategic approach to stimulating corporate business growth through digital transformation. By partnering with Markswebb, the client successfully aligned its services with corporate expectations, significantly increased the volume of daily operations, and positioned itself as a market leader in corporate banking services.
Every year we conduct up to 15 studies of digital services. These are industry benchmarks that reflect the state of the market and trends.
