Future Financial Services
(Service Concept)

Köln International School of Design was invited to Shenkar College of Engineering and Design in Ramat Gan, to take part in a collaboration with Israel‘s biggest bank, Hapoalim. The project was supervised by Prof. Birgit Mager and Idan Segev. The main objective was to find new ways to make banking appear more attractive to the Generation Y, by using service design as a core tool. 16 students from Shenkar and six students from Cologne, explored crucial pain and gain points and created first concepts and prototypes for digital services. These services aim to support Hapoalim in regaining their customers trust by meeting the visual language and wants of especially Millennials.

Research

Designing new services for financial institutions, during our digital age, requires a certain amount of knowledge regarding the current state of (digital) banking in general and broad insights from all stakeholders. Profound research was therefore a major priority during this project.

Before traveling to Israel, we acquired industry knowledge and learned about how millennials currently deal with the financial world. We conducted interviews and understood the mindset and behavior of our target group, by creating empathy maps out of our findings. This provided us with enough information to create personas for a deeper understanding of our key audience.

In conclusion, we identified that digital banks must develop their own trustful brand and create a seamless journey for their customer’s banking experience!

Research-Project, 2016
Desk Research:
Dmitrii Kuznetsov, Joelle Siebenaller, Naja Schulz
Personas: Christoph Claus
Interviews & Empathy Map: Matthias Grund
Service Design Methods: Katharina Sook Wilting

After arriving in Israel, the final briefing by Bank Hapoalim said to create a new, shiny and sexy app for the Generation Y. After some final research on the spot, it became very clear, that we could not continue to work on this specific briefing any longer. We realized, that the relationship between young Israeli citizens and their bank is so damaged, that a new, fancy user interface would not provide any value or improve the current situation. Rather, we had to reframe our design brief and focus our work on the key problems we discovered during the interview stage, which were a lack of transparency and trust, insecurities about the financial future and a general feeling of being overlooked.

In an intensive one-week creation phase, we worked on ideas and concepts for new digital services, which could regain trust and improve the relationship between the customer and bank.

Help us – Help you

Help us – Help you, is a web-platform, where young Hapoalim customers can express themselves and share their ideas on a better banking experience.

The entire community can react to the shared ideas and discuss them within the platform. The bank is able to see the most important topics, from their young customers, with the help of a rating system and can start to cooperate with the most promising ideas. Bank Hapoalim will invite the customers, with the best ideas, to a co-creation event in their digital branch located in Tel Aviv. During this event, the candidates’ ideas will be developed further, to create actual campaigns, which will be supported by both the bank and young Israelis.

This provides the opportunity for Hapoalim customers to team up with their bank and help improve their own future. This project focuses especially on the two major pain points of trust and transparency, between Hapoalim customers and their bank, to ultimately improve their relationship.

Service Concept, 2016
Research & Content: Ori Oren, Sivan Ibel
Concept & Interface Design: Matthias Grund