In a landscape where the fintech market had yet to fully cater to a crucial yet overlooked audience, a leading global bank embarked on an innovative journey to redefine digital services for corporate decision-makers. Partnering with Markswebb, the bank set its sights on becoming a frontrunner in digital services tailored for business owners and top executives, aiming to significantly enhance their banking experience.
The digital banking landscape had largely overlooked the nuanced needs of business leaders, focusing instead on operational functionalities suited to general users. This oversight left a critical gap in services designed to support the strategic, financial, and operational decisions that corporate leaders face daily.
The goal was clear: to develop a comprehensive understanding of the financial needs and preferences of senior decision-makers in large and medium-sized enterprises and to create digital solutions that directly address these requirements. This initiative aimed to not only streamline their financial operations but also provide strategic insights, thereby positioning the bank as the preferred choice for business banking.
Contents
Together with the bank, we hypothesized that decision-makers rarely (or never) use existing services. However, to test this, we first needed to understand who we actually consider these decision-makers.
Therefore, we broke down the project into four aspects:
The audience we studied in this project is not only narrow and heterogeneous but, in fact, had not been specifically studied by anyone in the market before us.
When creating a digital service for business, teams often focus on owners and CEOs and do not seek further insights. However, in different companies, important decisions are made by individuals with various positions and responsibilities; not all of them directly work with digital services.
Before conducting the interviews, we created a comprehensive guide for those conducting them. This custom tool for the specific project helped to determine:
The interview guide is extremely detailed, containing over 30 points. Each point includes a main open-ended question and several leading questions that help the respondent provide a more detailed and in-depth answer. Here’s an example of one of the points:
Each question has a specific goal. To ensure interviewers keep these goals in focus, the guide’s authors explained them. Here’s an example of explanations from the same point, but intended for the interviewer:
Each question in the interview aims to provide researchers with a fragment of comprehensive knowledge about decision-makers and their tasks.
In the end, we conducted well-prepared interviews with target users. Each response helped us build the desired profiles and several Customer Journey Maps (CJMs) with detailed task descriptions.
Without revealing specifics, we’ll present these CJMs "from a bird’s eye view":
This is how we package the obtained information into user journey maps.
In this project, we created five Customer Journey Maps. They represent the user journeys of decision-makers in the process of solving their tasks. This powerful tool immediately revealed numerous gaps between what the market currently offers and what the audience needs.
It turned out that most of what the fintech market offers to top managers is not in demand, and conversely, almost none of what they would actually use exists.
Each map reflects:
We formulated 10 findings for the client based on the project; here are 3 of them:
As a result, the bank gained key insights into the market, a repository of useful practices, and Customer Journey Maps (CJMs) - a tool that will enable the bank to achieve leadership in creating services for decision-makers.
Using this set of CJMs and the results of its own research, the bank is already developing a corporate mobile banking solution for special clients - owners and top managers of large and medium-sized companies - to provide them with a convenient tool for managing company liquidity and communications with the bank.
For fintech companies, CRM solutions providers, or telecom industries working with medium to large businesses, this case study offers valuable insights into creating digital services that truly meet the expectations of top decision-makers.
Partner with us to explore how our research and innovative solutions can help you capture the attention of this key demographic!
Every year we conduct up to 15 studies of digital services. These are industry benchmarks that reflect the state of the market and trends.