Building digital solutions to transform liquidity management for businesses
How can a major regional bank help their business clients manage their liquidity more seamlessly? We researched the needs, challenges and solutions faced by these clients and designed a brand new liquidity management platform for the bank.
Client
Multinational Bank
Industry
Financial Services
Services
Research & Insights, Strategy & Innovation, Design & Delivery
Digital Solutions for Liquidity Management
The challenge
A regional bank looked to revolutionise their business customers’ experience of managing cash and liquidity across multiple entities and borders. Traditionally a tedious, manual process managed via phone calls and spreadsheets by Relationship Managers (RM), these business clients struggled with the lack of efficiency and visibility.
Recognising an opportunity to build a closer relationship with these business clients, the bank sought to develop a new digital offering that would enable clients to easily view, manage and plan their liquidity with greater speed and transparency.
PSYKHE was challenged to uncover the needs and pain points of these business clients, in order to make data-driven decisions within the ideation, design and development process.
The approach
To understand the issues that enterprise customers faced in liquidity management, PSYKHE collaborated with the bank’s Product and Design teams to conduct user interviews and concept tests with 15 SMEs and MNCs.
With data from these interviews, PSYKHE developed a customised segmentation framework to categorise the bank’s clients based on their treasury maturity and technology adoption. We found that while liquidity management is a pressing need for all types of regional organisations, one segment of clients, in particular, would benefit the most from a new, centralised liquidity management platform.
Regional companies with higher treasury maturity typically employ third-party and custom treasury solutions to automate and consolidate financial data from multiple entities. This segment of bank customers would rarely rely on one bank’s liquidity platform as a single source of truth, making them unsuitable as potential target audiences for the bank.
On the other hand, companies poised for regional expansion, who sought one primary banking partner, had growing liquidity management needs without a suitable dedicated platform. Herein lies the opportunity for the bank to step up with a digital product tailored to their unique context.
From 66 initial How Might We opportunity areas uncovered from the research, PSYKHE prioritised the 12 statements most relevant to this target audience. We designed and facilitated ideation workshops for the bank’s internal business teams, where solutions were generated based on insights on their clients’ struggles and a review of the competitive landscape.
Research synthesis
Customer segmentation
The impact
66
Potential HMW problems defined âś…
12
Critical User Stories prioritised đź’¬
1
MVP delivered within 6 weeks ✏️
With PSYKHE’s facilitation, the bank’s internal teams generated potential solutions that were then prioritised based on feasibility and impact. Designed specifically for growing businesses who lacked tools to consolidate their treasury data, the MVP would offer a centralised solution for liquidity management, providing these clients a richer, more holistic view of their regional cash flow.
Once the MVP has been defined, PSYKHE worked closely alongside the bank’s business, product and technology teams to explore the design concepts, constraints and dependencies behind delivering the optimal experience for business customers.
Our comprehensive user stories​ and detailed implementation roadmap set the groundwork for the design and launch of the MVP within 3 short months. Key features included in the MVP are as follows:
Search and Filter Accounts: providing a simpler way for businesses to identify the correct accounts, view and set-up new transactions
Liquidity Sweep Visualisations​: providing business customers a clearer way to understand and set up automated sweep mechanisms
Notional Pool and Structure Visualisation​s: enabling businesses to optimise their group’s cash balances and reduce the need to borrow
Through this transformative digital platform, PSYKHE empowered the bank’s customers with better visibility and control of their liquidity. RMs at the bank lowered their costs to serve and streamlined customers’ liquidity management requests, while gaining new tools to optimise clients’ liquidity and growth. The bank thus saw notable increases to their transaction volume and overall revenue.
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