Metro Bank, Nominate a beneficiary on the mobile app

From frustration to frictionless: transforming savings account payments with just a few taps.

The problem, at least on the surface.

As part of Metro Bank’s 2024 cost cutting strategy, an existing process, Nominating a beneficiary (making external transfers from a savings account) landed on my desk.

Customers were unable to make payments out of their savings accounts unless they visited a branch or called customer service. This manual process created friction for customers and increased servicing costs.

To complicate matters further, payment regulations dictate that customers should not use savings accounts for regular payments unless they go through strict due diligence. A slow and long set of questions that Metro Bank, and most other banks, do not have for savings accounts.

What’s the current state?

Customers can currently make payments from their savings account if they:

• Visit a branch
• Call customer service
• Log in to Online (Web) banking

However if they start their journey on the mobile app, they are lured into a false sense of security as they can go through the payment making process and are then given a generic error message.

Really frustrating!

The positives with understanding the current state was that it is possible to make a payment from a savings account. The customer might have to switch channels though.

Could we just redirect customers to the Online banking web platform?

Food for thought.

I can see the frustration, but what do customers say?

I went through countless NPS survey reviews and comments that were sent out after a customer called Metro Banks customer service and made a payment from their savings account. The key insights gave me a ideas for how we could improve the experience.

Error prevention?

Make payments from savings accounts as easy as a regular payment?

Key insights:

A quick look at what was built

I know you want to see what we built, so here’s a quick summary before you take a look at how we got there.

How do other banks handle this problem?

They just let the customer make the payment. Theres no nominating a payee process. Hmmm....so why does Metro Bank have all this red tape?

It turns out, we are far more risk averse than other banks. The compliance and risk team are experts here. But maybe they’ll understand that this is a terrible customer experience.

Collaborate early, and often

I brought my insights to the cross functional team. Including but not limited to the Product Owner, Engineers, UI developers, and other stakeholders were invited too.

Through a collaborative workshop the cross functional team and myself came up with some opportunities, potential solutions, and ways to test them. These were mapped out in an opportunity tree, a way of visualising all of the opportunities and explorations in a project that I had implemented earlier in the year that seems to work well for the team.

Using insights from customer verbatim research and the ideas from the collaborative workshop I could see that just letting customers make payments is what they want and an elegant way to help customers make payments from savings accounts. An idea that the team also raised and called “auto-nomination”. However when I presented an initial prototype to the team they raised a couple constraints:

1. There is a glitch which means the mobile app doesn’t always recognise if an account has a nominated beneficiary.
2. The nominating a payee process would need to be built from scratch and would take some time.

By having key stakeholders and developers in the room, we were able to prioritise the projects chunks into 3 phases.

A roadmap that delivers value faster

In order to build the solution that will give customers the most value we decided to chunk the project into 3 stages.

Phase 1: Signposting

Phase 1 included signposting customers about the restrictions in making a payment from a savings account. Then directing them to a way to fix the problem.

Whilst designing these screens I found that the in line alert messages were not accessible, I designed new components and brought them into the design library. You can see below that the links did not meet AA contrast.

Phase 2: Nominating in app

An initial prototype was tested with 20 customers with the aim of understanding any usability issues. The key feedback was:

1. The rules for nominating a beneficiary are not clear in the journey
2. The platform alerts caused users to abandon or feel scared
3. CTAs could be more clear and give users better expectations

I implemented, tested and documented a new style of alert. Custom bottom sheets were used to allow for contextual information that allows the user to continue with their journey. This reduced the fear of pressing a scary alert whilst informing customers of changes their actions could have.

To modernize Metro Bank’s design system and streamline collaboration, I introduced new, accessible components tailored to enhance usability. These included the new custom bottom sheets for alerts and contextual guidance, empowering teams to implement features independently while maintaining a consistent user experience.

Chatbot integration

To create a seamless journey and to leave no stone unturned, I made sure to speak to the Chatbot team. Including support and deep links back into the payment journeys allowed for any complexities in the second phase to be mitigated through a support channel.

Any further support required would be directed to a human. The contact centre team were briefed by myself and the training team on what they could expect when a customer contacts them with a nominated beneficiary query to ensure aligned business readiness.

We also set up the chatbot and contact centre team to monitor the requests so that we can analyse the effectiveness of the

Phase 3: Just make the payment

The final phase removes inline alert messages and instead replaces them with more subtle guidance around and potential future issues with their payment. However in most cases customers will be able to make the payment in exactly the same way as they make payments from a current account, without any additional steps. This reduced friction creates familiarity and trust.

Phase 3 is currently being rolled out in a phased approach with customers and we are collecting insights before launching to the full 3.1 million customers.

What were the results again?

What did I learn in this project?