From Karen Pascoe, Managing Director, Head of Design Innovation at Wells Fargo

At Wells Fargo, we have a complex digital transformation underway. From a user experience perspective, we are highly focused on generational change. In financial services, we often talk of a generational transfer of wealth as a massive opportunity. But there’s also a generational transfer of digital experience expectations. A baby boomer who has been trained on wire transfer may be OK with a lengthy user manual, having to be retrained sporadically as new capabilities are infrequently released. A generation X user may be comfortable restarting the computer when the system hangs and phoning customer support as needed. Discomfort starts to set in with older millennials. If you don’t want your younger users to say “OK boomer” to your digital experience, you need to put an outsize focus on research, design, customer journey management and meeting your clients where they are.

Our digital transformation centers around a personalized experience that is tailored to satisfy the diverse needs and expectations of our users. From the outset of reimagining our digital banking experience, we put careful focus on cultural change drivers that would make it easy for teams to put our clients at the center of their work across silos. We crafted a series of personas honed from over a decade of ethnographic research with our clients. They have been helpful amalgamations of client needs, or “jobs to be done.” These personas cover the range of generations and roles that our clients play as they engage with us. We bring them into our work in a variety of ways: reimaging a key client journey, putting focus on a particular segment or persona, guiding complex transformations with digital/platform/process components and seeing how our end-to-end experience lines up. Research and design teams use a series of exercises with cross functional partners to help them deeply understand and empathize with our clients, their needs, pain points and success criteria. This deep understanding of client needs gets teams to focus on right client problems to solve vs. spinning on solutions that miss the mark.

To show how we work with these, let’s meet Ambitious Amy. She’s an older millennial VP of Finance for a rapidly growing cybersecurity company. She’s highly tech savvy, preferring Slack to emails. Being at the forefront of technology, she’s interested in a banking partner that will allow her organization to grow rapidly with software that powers her business. She expects her needs to be understood and met in her digital experience, with an ease of finding the information and reporting she needs to make decisions. Seamlessly connected solutions also appeal to her, with our capabilities embedded into systems that she uses and where we can add value to our solutions with relevant APIs and SDKs. As a new customer to Wells, she expects to be up and running quickly from executing a contract to onboarding to making payments. Our teams have been using Ambitious Amy and our other dozen personas to bring a shared focus on who we are solving for, allowing business, digital product, experience design, relationship management, service, operations, and others to work apace. Teams make better client-centric decisions that roll up to a unified vision. Research and client listening are embedded into journey teams operating in a continuous delivery mode. This focus helps ensure that the front end of the digital experience—the complex technology powering it and the layers of work requiring orchestration (value streams, platform upgrades, service model modernization)—all come together in service of our clients.

Wells Fargo Vantage is where our client centric focus comes together in software that helps our clients run and grow their businesses. Our personas and multigenerational thinking have driven design and technology decisions to completely modernize the experience our commercial, corporate and investment banking clients have. We are the only platform that provides a one stop shop for our clients’ business needs. Other banks have multiple platforms, with siloed service models. Here, as our client’s business grows, we grow without our clients having to relearn how to work with us. With our unique ability to customize, this product can scale from clients that are $2M in revenue to $2T.

Our initial rollout of Vantage was about a year after we started the research and design process. We are using an advanced middleware, micro front ends, that allows us to intelligently present complex technology developed over time in a unified and highly usable client experience. This approach allowed us to get our entire client base onto the new platform in another nine months, which is incredibly fast for a large organization like Wells Fargo. While more work is ahead in getting all of our experiences fully integrated, we are sending a significant message on the shape of things to come.

These visible signs of change create a virtuous cycle of engagement, where clients are leaning into new product experience R&D as well as various forms of listening – from usability testing to digital feedback to becoming an early adopter of new capabilities.

Our transformation also has quantitative proof points. After migrating, 99% of our users adapted to the new experience without needing support and without disrupting their daily usage. Clients shared that it is “much simpler to navigate” and “easy to access and user friendly.” They have been able to improve efficiency because banking tasks now take “30% less time”.

Over time, artificial intelligence and machine learning will serve increasingly individualized experiences that continue to speak to functional and experiential expectations.