I was hired as a consultant to work with Eika for over a year as a Senior UX and UI designer for complex infrastructure projects that stem from the banking core system to the users end experience. My role also involved helping to grow and nurture an internal culture which uses design thinking to think beyond traditional banking and to make smarter decicions, faster. The design team is now a well established function in how the bank moves forward strategically to meet it's future goals and ambitions.
Our focus was to look outside the traditional banking experience to new generation experiences within payments, transactions, personal and business economy, smart personalisation and customer service.
With the soon-to-be arrival of the EU PSD2 directive, and open banking the acquisition and control of 3rd party integrations and a new more agile approach to product development and product iteration was a huge focus.
We established a flexible design system that involved not only physical components and modules in Sitecore but also design methodologies, that the bank could strategically use to solve new design challenges.
When it came to technology we had to build a hybrid experience that worked coherently across all platforms, collecting and personalising core data and presenting it in a way that would assist the user in the next stage of their banking journey. We did this through predictive personalisation - which meant that based on rules we could pro-actively advise the customer assisting them with better financial decisions.
Eika is a large organisation with many departments and stakeholders. By involving the various representatives at a high level we managed to create more consensus around common business goals shared across departments, which made it a lot easier to get the buy-in for future projects.
Eika Group consists of 74 local banks in Norway. Eika has total assets of over 360 Billion kroners, close to a million customers and more than 3000 employees, making them one of the largest players in the Norwegian banking market, and an important player for local communities.
