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CLIENT CASE STUDY

European banking group: Start-up of Widiba, an innovative online bank

Accenture helps European financial group launch innovative online brand attracting digital customers and bringing financial advisors to high profile clients.

Overview

The European banking group wanted to increase its appeal to digitally focused customers and provide a new dedicated online banking offering. Accenture collaborated with the group to set up a new digital bank organization and IT front-end platform independent from the parent bank.

Accenture and the bank leveraged responsive design and a hybrid mobile app approach to support multiple devices with a focus on user experience excellence. The digital platform was successfully launched within the first year, and the combined team also migrated the financial advisors and related 100,000 customers on schedule. Within the first three months, the digital bank has acquired approximately 10,000 new digital customers, and it is now recognized as a recommended-practice leader in its national market for social banking and customer experience.

Opportunity
The European banking group wanted to increase its appeal to digitally focused customers and provide a new dedicated online banking offering. The online bank would help the banking group acquire new customers from the digital segment, provide financial advisors to high profile customers through digital channels and improve its own brand that was low attractive for digital people.

The online bank turned to Accenture with the goal of launching within a single year and migrating financial advisors from the parent bank's IT system within three months of the launch.

SOLUTION

To prioritize innovation, Accenture collaborated with the digital bank in setting up its front-end IT system and digital processes independent from the parent bank. The team was determined to adopt market solutions only for very specialized features, and preferred custom development or open source to reduce costs. The system's development was agile-based, leveraged responsive design and a hybrid mobile app approach to support multiple devices with the same page and adopted new technologies, like the login by voice or social alerts or digital signature, to be the most innovative bank in its national market. The new front end was also designed to integrate with the banking group's core system, provide an excellent user experience, a high degree of personalization, like the capability to choose among 9 different languages, and a high level of online service (i.e. account opening in 1 hour).

Results

The online bank was successfully launched within the first year, and the combined team migrated from the parent bank the financial advisors and related 100,000 customers on schedule. Within the first three months, the online bank had acquired approximately 10,000 new digital customers, and is recognized as a recommended-practice leader in its national market for social banking, customer experience and innovation.

With the online bank already on track for its three-year goals of 500,000 new customers and 100 percent return on investment, the bank is considering extending the digital offering to other customer segments with the same mix of innovation and high service levels.