The challenge

The retail market leader OTP Bank invited us to help them develop an innovative cross-selling strategy for their personal loans. The challenge was formulated as follows: “How can we increase cross-selling of personal loans through personalized, life-event-driven communication?”.

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The process

We began the process by setting up a cross-functional team to increase efficiency and cover all needed competence, consisting of banking experts, data analysts, marketing experts, UX designers and innovation consultants.

As preparation for a focused 5-day Design Sprint we worked in a strong collaboration with the previously set up team to analyze all prior research related to the retail segment and plan the direction of customer interviews and user tests. We involved the bank’s management in the Design Sprint process, which greatly contributed to its efficiency and impact.

We have identified the “pain & gain” points that guide the customer’s decision making, and designed personas based on behavioural patterns. We collected the main life events and all related triggers. We crafted the content of the messages and the appropriate timing associated with those, and also built and validated 2 prototypes that supported the cross-selling activities of the responsible sales teams.

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The impact

The result of the sprint was not only the cross-selling strategy and the preparation of the implementation, but also we explored how the design thinking mindset can best be applied at organizational level.

So with an organizational-level focus, we held leadership workshops to familiarize the management with the Design Thinking mindset and methodologies, and to define the bank’s future strategy around the application of Design Thinking.

We co-created answers to strategic questions around building and strengthening capabilities within the organization; how to gather and facilitate design challenges; how to build processes that allow us to connect with customers as a unified company; how Design Thinking and Scrum can work together; how to apply Design Sprints in a large enterprise environment; and how to divide user interviews and testing tasks between product marketing teams.

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