- by Cindy Ranchon
- July 6, 2022
Digital at the heart of transformation
How might we redesign the global transaction process for corporate clients of the bank in China?
It’s the question Société Générale China brought to the table. The French bank has been a leader in digital transformation globally, with global headquarters particularly active in bringing tech to the heart of banking. But China is a different world altogether and the group has the ambition to be a major player in the future of trade in Asia Pacific. Over the pandemic crisis, bringing value to the customers and employees while enabling remote operations has hence proven more important than ever. So we called our friends and partners from Staizen to combine the best of digital and human-centered design to help the bank re-imagine its global transactions process, platform and customer experience in China.
Crafting a moonshot vision without constraints
The first step in our collaborative journey was to conduct internal and external interviews to diagnose the current state and define the contours of the challenge. Through this approach, we collected key insights and gained a deep understanding of the hurdles. Which in turn helped us formulate problem statements around 5 work streams core: Customer experience, Process, People & Culture, Way of working and Technology & systems.
We validated our insights with the sponsors and the operational teams and put together a collaborative whiteboard on Mural to run a Design Sprint remotely, with collaborators connecting from mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Europe.
To adapt to the corporate business agenda and the challenge at hand, we decided to split the Design Sprint into 2 phases of 3 days. The first part would allow us to dig further into the problems, share perspectives from different departments and start exploring different paths. Then the break would allow collaborators to conduct some research online as well as validate their assumptions and initial ideas internally, before coming back to the drawing board. In the second half of the program, we had them stitch their best ideas together and co-develop solutions to tackle our different problem statements, always looking at it with a systemic view, including internal and external perspectives.
We brought in a senior designer to help materializing process and customer experience and had the key sponsors of the project checking in regularly to assess the progress of the team and encourage them to think bigger and bolder.
Designed and validated
At the end of the 6 days, we had 2 workflows and the a customer interface prototyped and ready to be put in front of relevant stakeholders for feedback.
Then, with the help of our UX Designer and through individual and collective design sessions with collaborators and internal experts on different aspect of the challenge, we iterated different version of the prototype and completed the workflow.
After just a few weeks, the employees of Société Générale China finally managed to materialize the new digital payment process an end-to-end, while acquiring a new skill set and a methodology they can now use to solve the next challenges.
In the words of the sponsors and participants, it was an intensive program, with foreign concepts they quickly familiarized with, when they saw the value it created to generate insights, ideas and productive collaboration, while allowing them to make lightning fast progress on complex topics.
