Designing for disruption in the financial sector

Back in November 2019, we were thrilled to be appointed as the experience design partners for the development of a brand new app-based investing proposition called ‘Yuh’.

Conceived by Swissquote – a Swiss banking group specialising in the provisioning of online financial and trading services – Yuh was to be Swissquote’s disruptor in a changing banking and investment landscape.

Making investment accessible to everyone

Yuh’s core ambition was to: “become the first platform for anyone who wants to achieve financial freedom by helping clients to spend smarter and invest more.” It would weave investing, saving and banking together in a way that broke down traditional barriers.

Swissquote wanted to demystify the world of stocks, shares, crypto and day-to-day banking and prove that you didn’t have to be a financial whiz or hedge fund manager – all you needed was Yuh.

However, creating a product for previously unengaged users in an already highly competitive market wouldn’t be easy. We knew differentiation would be essential if we wanted to appeal to millennials.

Millennials, our target demographic, are known to have particularly high standards for in-app user experience. They have far less tolerance for poor customer experiences than their predecessors and put a lot of value on not only doing the right thing, but designing well and with them in mind.

Swissquote recognised that to deliver an innovative, market-changing app, they wouldn’t just have to design to a very high standard. They’d have to make excellent customer experience the very thing that set them apart from their competitors – and the driver that would keep their users coming back.

Since launch in May 2021, Yuh has steadily grown in its native Switzerland and is now available in four main languages: English, French, German and Italian. It is also delivering a sustainable new account growth rate of 1,400 new ‘Yuhsers’ per week; this is a signal of the proposition’s strong fundamentals.

It’s already clear that Yuh will shake up the investing and banking space in Europe over the next few years.

So, how did we do it?

Beginning with shared understanding

At the outset of the project, Swissquote’s Yuh team presented us with two sets of existing thinking. The first was a structured MVP composed of 27 requirements framing what the app had to do. These requirements covered core functionality as well as what we call ‘hygiene’ factors, which are features that every investing or banking app need to deliver.

Building on core functionality, we would then include other features that would create and deliver unique and tailored user experiences. These would be supplemented by a focus on a multi-currency credit card and, critically, a simplification of the investment ‘universe.’ This meant we could actively help users make better and more informed choices.

Their second set of requirements was an initial guide to the brand covering their values and the key three pillars of Yuh’s proposition: ‘Pay’, ‘Save’ and ‘Invest’. Our brief was to turn these requirements and initial thinking into a market winning app that could scale globally.

Investing in experience excellence

The Yuh team in Switzerland also showed us that behind the proposition was complex data that we had to make easy to understand, as well as delightful to engage with. This is true of our work where we can so often mistakenly think experience is all about design and style.

Really, it’s the systems we help put in place to keep the experience consistent and relevant, but also back-end systems and data the organisation requires to run the business. A great experience not only takes care of what the customer touches, but also covers the back-end systems that help measure and manage it. This is what we refer to as total experience – the business and customer together.

This perspective helped guide the creation of the Yuh brand and helped us put the customer at the heart of everything we did. Ultimately helping us to challenge the banking sector with a unique experience and tailored approach. Yuh became something fresh, bold, fun and exciting – essentially a new ‘21st century modern’.

Providing skills and leadership in integrated teams

We all know the best way to design is collaboratively. Collaborative working provides common goals and allows a shared sense of purpose to emerge – we call this a One Team approach. Nomensa complemented Swissquote by providing additional capabilities and expertise across a spectrum of skills.

Once we had established a one team approach, we then worked in design sprints to ensure we could tackle their requirements at pace, shaping the customer experience and brand within their ambitious timescales. This ensured validation through testing within each sprint too.

We also decided to form a core, dedicated team with what we called ‘orbiting skills’ to support. This included a core team of six T-shaped individuals across UX, design and project management. We also tapped into our skills pool of Motion Graphic experts, App Developers, Information Architecture (IA) leads and Content Designers.

Designing a foundation for the future

We knew from the start of the first sprint that our work on the IA would be fundamental to the app’s success. We appreciated the app would form a foundation piece within a broader omni-channel strategy, so it’s future viability had to have scalability baked-in. This also meant the IA would need to be able to cope with future demands and, of course, expanding audience types.

We understood the importance of the three pillars of Pay-Save-Invest and ensured that they would have to stand proud – a proposition that immediately resonated with the audience. This meant integrating the pillars into the design and IA. Meanwhile, clearly signposted ‘YuhLearn’ content like ‘how to’ guides and expert commentary allowing users to engage and learn at their speed in their way.

We knew that providing control was a key feature to shaping the highest quality experience, and by extension we recognised that ‘experience’ became THE feature. This meant we could then work on the style of the experience that would act as a golden thread choreographing all features, needs and expectations.