Co-op bank - Digital Foundations

In 2015, Radical was approached by Co-operative Bank’s senior leadership to transform their existing digital design, technology, and deployment methods which were slow, cumbersome, and inefficient. Radical was challenged to review, improve and audit their onboarding journeys.

To understand how customers interact via their websites to initiate an engagement with Co-op bank, Radical provided the bank with three end-to-end delivery teams to work onsite at Manchester. The teams combined delivery, UX, visual design, full-stack development, DevOps, and Test QA and began setting up new foundations to build upon. 

In collaboration with the internal team at Co-op bank, Radical’s initial steps towards the solution were to review the analytics of the existing onboarding journeys to understand the user experience. The findings suggested that the onboarding process was prolonged, time-consuming, and included forms without proper validation which wildly impacted the user experience leading to low conversion rates.

Radical was also entrusted to review the technologies that were being used for these onboarding journeys. The integration of the different databases across the bank potentially contributed to slow load time and poor user experience. The inconsistencies in the design of each individual onboarding journey not only affected the user experience but made it difficult for the bank to maintain these pages.

Keeping in mind the findings of the audit, Radical supported the internal creation of new frameworks for innovation (e.g. design language framework, agile end to end delivery, etc), defined new digital investment cycles, coached internal teams to take a vertical slicing approach (e.g. UX to integration and deployment) all supported with consultancy to help the bank decouple itself of internal constraints. The bank experienced immediate improvement across the conversion rate of these onboarding journeys.

Radical’s approach has provided the bank a continuous delivery of value model that can be measured from idea to launch. Radical has also recently scaled the internal capability and are now coaching the senior executive board on how to invest, measure, and evolve new digital-only propositions.