Helping a major Vietnamese bank to transform its everyday banking experience to become more customer-centric. This project was during my time working at Prophet, a growth and transformation consulting company.
MB Bank or Military Bank is one of the largest banks in Vietnam. It was originally a bank for military personnel in Vietnam before evolving into an everyday banking service.
UX/UI Designer (my role)
Project Manager
UX Designer
Strategist
MB faced growing pressure from new domestic and foreign competitors entering the growing Vietnamese banking market. Meanwhile, customer expectations were rising, as a seamless, more personalised digital service was becoming the norm, given experiences in other banking and non-banking industries.
To win in this new environment, MB set a bold ambition to be a top 3 bank in Vietnam, grow to 10M customers by 2021, and be the bank with the best customer experience.
Prophet was asked to develop a multi-year strategy and growth plan for MB to achieve its ambitions. This included identifying and segmenting target customers, developing growth moves, running UX sprints, and providing support to MB for a rebrand and a new innovation lab.
Traditional banks are losing relevance among customers who are increasingly open to other options such as digital banking. Given this, MB needed to reimagine the user experience of their banking app; they realised that revamping their UX design to address key consumer pain points was critical to achieving their ambition.
We started with a detailed UX teardown to map the current user experience and identify pain points and opportunities.
With this future state in mind, the team conducted UX sprints to rapidly ideate and iterate on improvements and new MVP features for the app. In the process of sprinting, the Prophet team helped educate the MB team on the agile methodologies so that they could conduct their own sprints moving forward.
We delivered high-fidelity visuals for the app, reflecting the future state experience, and an Agile Playbook to codify processes, framework and tools.
The old app experience was complicated and packed with features, from the ability to book flights to a gambling game. One of the main changes we made was to strip the experience back as much as possible, to simplify the fundamentals of a banking app. This resonated well in usability testing as it felt similar to other modern apps.
Being able to test with Vietnamese users was essential to getting accurate feedback. We went to Hanoi and carried out qualitative usability testing. Translators helped us run the tests, so we had to develop testing scripts for them. We recorded the tests as videos of the users, noting their expressions, as well as a top-down of the screen so we could see live reactions and match them to the specific flow they were following.
One of the most interesting pieces of cultural learning was the ‘show balance’ feature. We discovered that the Vietnamese wanted a ‘show and hide’ button to look at the account balance on the app to maintain privacy even after signing in.
Finally, we took an innovative approach to launch a signature Family Banking offer in the MB App
Prophet developed the growth move based on insights from the segmentation, which revealed high importance of planning family finances, which we observed as a gap in the market.
We leverage a design thinking approach to develop the Family Banking products and services, starting from research of target consumers, uncovering key need states for families, and defining a set of opportunity areas to focus ideation on.
The team gathered further insights by conducted an online survey and an internal ideation session to create more than 60 Family Banking ideas, which were then refined and prioritized into 4 concepts for 2019 and additional concepts for 2020 & 2021.
For each of the concepts, Prophet defined activation horizons with execution requirements and a roadmap for launch of new features throughout 2019 – 2021, as well as high quality visuals to bring the concepts to life.
The digital banking app revamp project ran alongside a number of other projects Prophet carried out for MB Bank, including a branding project. We first launched the redesigned app using their old branding.
Following an internal rollout to inspire and educate employees, the MB Bank rebrand was officially launched to the public on the day of MB’s 25th anniversary, marking the next chapter in their journey towards transformation.
For our team, the clearest impact was that the MB Bank Digital Banking app was the #1 overall app in Vietnam on the Apple App Store for a number of months (currently sitting in the top 15).
Our contributions also helped towards a few other awards.
MB Bank was awarded ‘Most Improved Bank of the Year’ for its refreshed brand platform, along with two other awards at The Asian Banker Vietnam Awards 2020.
Our work with MB Bank was awarded gold at the 2020 Transform Awards Asia for “Best Brand Development Project to Reflect a Change of Mission/Values/Positioning”.
“We are delighted to have a trusted strategic partner in Prophet and they have played a crucial role in our very important transformation journey as we evolve towards becoming a digital-first bank.”
