// CASE 07 · BANCA ETICA · SERVICE DESIGN
What does a bank that puts ethics first owe its customers at the counter?
Banca Etica, the first ethical bank in Italy, wanted to know what digital transformation should mean for a bank whose value is the relationship. We went to five branches and asked, then designed the experience it should become.
5
branches observed: Milan, Rome, Bologna, Naples, Perugia
~40
in-depth interviews, 90 minutes each, with customers and staff
3
actors in every to-be journey: customer, employee, organisation
1999
the year the bank was founded on the principles we had to protect
01
Executive summary
A bank that inspires every decision, operational and cultural, to ethical finance cannot copy the digital playbook of a retail bank. We immersed in the organisation through stakeholder interviews and past research, then went to the branches: contextual observation, intercept interviews, and around forty long interviews with selected customers and employees. From that we defined the experience foundation, the experience vision, and the to-be journeys for every touchpoint and every actor involved.
02
Four phases
➔ Immersion: stakeholder interviews, review of previous research, workshop on problems and opportunities
➔ Research: observation and intercepts in five branches, ~40 in-depth interviews with customers and staff
➔ Analysis and synthesis: customer archetypes, perceptions, expectations, friction on each channel
➔ Strategic approach: experience foundation, experience vision, to-be journeys and redesigned workflows
Tools & tactics
Contextual observation
Intercept and in-depth interviews
Customer archetypes
To-be journey mapping
03
Issues discovered
➔ Customers chose the bank for its values and then met the same friction as anywhere else.
➔ Branch staff carried the relationship by hand, with no digital tool that knew the customer.
➔ Channels did not talk to each other: what started in the branch did not continue online.
➔ The values that brought people in were invisible in the everyday touchpoints.
➔ Different customer archetypes had different expectations, and one journey served them all.
Four principles for an ethical bank
The relationship is the product
Digital serves the branch, not the other way round
Make the values visible where the money moves
One journey per archetype, one experience for all
04
Results
Banca Etica received a strategic proposal to improve its customer experience: an experience foundation and vision, redesigned workflows, to-be journeys per touchpoint, and a map of ideas and opportunities ranked by the research. What I cannot tell you: which parts the bank implemented, and how. Research engagements end where implementation begins, and this one did. What stays: it taught me to write the brief in the client's own values, and to test every design decision against them. It is the method I still use when a brand's values and its interface have drifted apart.
05
Lessons learned
➔ Values are a design constraint, not a marketing claim
➔ Forty long interviews beat four hundred survey answers when the question is trust
➔ Employees are users too, and often the most honest ones
➔ A to-be journey without the organisation's side is a wish, not a plan