BANCO MACRO
Digital transformation of B2B banking
Our challenge
Banco Macro, the fourth largest bank in Argentina, during one of the worst economic downturns of their country decides to accelerate its digital transformation. The B2B department director invites a consulting team from Globant, my employer, to complement them through the change.
We made the decision to start with Payroll Payments, the most strategic product. Specifically, the most painful part of the process for the employees: product acquisition.
Pressure to sharply reduce costs
Legacy customer management and support processes
Declining market share on high return products
Below average customer satisfaction
My contribution
I was the service designer assigned by Globant. My team worked together with the bank’s B2B and Digital Transformation teams. Due to the project’s focus on research, I was responsible for most of the activities:
- Create a research plan
- Prepare and facilitate workshops with employees
- Prepare and conduct interviews with employees and customers
- Help the bank visualize and analyze backstage flows and customer’s experiences
- Co-create with the bank’s employees and their clients to build a better product acquisition experience
- Prototyping the future internet B2B banking service through service blueprints
- Build a roadmap of initiatives to reach our intended experience targets
- Facilitate the prioritization of resulting initiatives
- Present metrics to track progress of the implementation
Team
Our team had a relationship with the bank from other digital transformation projects. We were three people from different disciplines: Service Design, Product Management, Business Hacking
Design Research
Objectives
- Identify pain points in the product acquisition processes for private businesses and government institutions
- Simplify internal operations to offer banking products digitally to businesses clients
- Become more simple, agile, and efficient
- Incentive self-service in our clients
- Begin enabling omnichannel experiences
Broadening the scope
The initial focus was placed on the processes from Commercial offer to Product activation. However, during research we decided to broaden our scope to include adjacent processes. This helped the bank to understand their pains in a more systemic context and later ideate more robust solutions.
Phases of the bank’s B2B Product Acquisition (in sequential order)
- Commercial offer preparation
- Commercial offer
- Proposal signing
- Product activation
- Product delivery and activation
- Aftersales service
The “Commercial offer preparation” phase was added because the pains of employees here affected the subsequent phases.
“Product delivery and activation“ and “Aftersales service“, were added because the pains of customers and employees impacted key metrics for business.
Differentiating Government from Private Companies
The particularities of payroll management (Client side) and client management (Bank’s side) meant the best practice was to separate both for the analysis.
However, most recommendations applied to both segments.
Co-creation and conflict management
To prevent colliding interests from interfering with facilitation, we worked with some teams separately while maintaining transparency.
I maintained several progress check-ins with the different departments that collaborated with the research, to show them that their ideas where being incorporated.
Prototypes and proposals
Simplified journeys prepared from service blueprints to present the main functionalities of a future B2B banking platform that consolidated data sources and the results of several smaller initiatives that we presented as a series of proposals.
Outcomes
Alignment: the six participating departments were committed with the digital transformation goals and shared a common set of initiatives. Some employees, who were initially identified as detractors of change, defended the new initiatives in presentations to the banks C-suite.
Most of these pains and opportunities for improvement we identified were also applicable the acquisition process of all other Products. As a result, we were able to offer much more impact with our work than what was requested, thus opening the door with B2B management for further collaboration.
Efficiency:
- Low effort improvements in the CRM system gave B2B executives more mobility, allowing them to improve sales targets.
- Reduced friction points for B2B executives and their clients, improving the selling process timeline.
Self-service:
- Reduce branch visits with value added digital experiences for the clients. Connect B2B executive with their clients in key moments of the journey.
Transparency:
- Incentive further trust by providing more visibility of the process to the client.
Paperless:
- Savings in document production and archiving.