Rethinking the Role of the Branch
As more everyday banking moves to digital channels, branches need a clearer purpose beyond routine transactions. In innovation-focused projects, the question was not only how to make the branch more efficient, but what the branch could become: a place for advice, relationship-building, assisted digital support, and banking-adjacent services that deepen customer engagement.
Research
Working with a lab field team of 3-4 researchers and service designers, I guided the team in studying how different customers and visitors used the branch — including retail customers, business customers, branch staff, and managers. Through observations, service walkthroughs, interviews, surveys, social sentiment, and behavioural data, we identified unmet needs around consultation, service consistency, branch atmosphere, staff support, and the physical environment.
The work helped teams reframe branch opportunities beyond routine banking, including advisory experiences, lifestyle or banking-adjacent services, events, relationship-building moments, and assisted digital tools. I also worked with senior UX designers to turn selected ideas into early-stage service concepts, user flows, and low-to-mid-fidelity prototypes for testing and further prioritization.
In process improvement projects, the focus was more operational: understanding where existing branch processes were breaking down and how those issues affected customers, staff, compliance, and service delivery. This included journeys such as account opening, KYC data collection, mobile banking activation and queueing experiences.
My role was to help the team conduct shadowing and observations to understand how these processes worked in real branch environments, synthesize pain points across customer journeys and staff workflows, and turn the findings into practical recommendations for branch, operations, technology, and strategy teams. The research surfaced hidden workarounds, connectivity issues, tool limitations, unclear error messages, bottlenecks, and moments where staff effort increased because the process or system did not fully support the task.
The work led to recommendations such as new digital tools, UI improvements, clearer error messages, and workflow changes that could help branch staff capture customer data faster and more accurately. It also helped teams prioritize which process issues could create quick wins, reduce operational risk, and improve the customer experience without adding more burden to branch staff.
