Rethinking banking

In response to a competitive retail banking market Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank Group (CYBG) set out to develop a banking proposition that challenged customers’ expectations of a bank. The result was ‘B’, a revolutionary, app-led service that provides customers with a simple solution for managing their money in the digital age.

CYBG knew that they needed to adopt new ways of working to allow them to deliver quickly and chose to partner with Deloitte to design and deliver not just B, but the cultural change, omni-channel approach and digital technology capabilities required to ensure that the B platform will be at the heart of their business for years to come.

The project kicked off in October 2014 with Deloitte consultants working with CYBG to shape the design and key features, while simultaneously proving some of the critical technologies that would help bring B to life.

The team moved to a new building to give the feel of a start-up. Teams of software engineers, creative designers and banking product and process experts worked side by side with user experience consultants running interactive labs understanding what customers liked and what they didn’t. The customer engagement continued for the life of the project, making for a truly collaborative, customer-focused design and build process.

Deloitte took a similarly agile approach to creating B’s omni-channel offering including the contact centre. From the earliest days of the project, the B contact centre agents worked alongside the development team and were completely immersed in designing the B customer experience.

B provides market leading features based on innovative technology; for example fuzzy searches (using partial matches of data) allow customers to search all of their transaction history in real-time. This same capability underpins a set of money management tools that auto-categorises spend, allows customers to add their own spend categories, analyses spending habits, projects future finances and uses those projections to help customers manage their money. No other account offers such a sophisticated toolkit.

The 18-month timeframe had its challenges. Delivering B meant combining a digital solution with pioneering big data infrastructure and integration into the bank’s existing banking and payments platforms – all while delivering the contact centre and branch experience and ensuring all regulatory and risk requirements were met.

An online current account opening process allowing customers to open and transact on their accounts in less than 15 minutes was launched in September 2015 and rapidly became one of the bank’s most important acquisition channels. The same account opening technical platform then supported the launch of B for both tablet and mobile on iOS and Android in April 2016.

B has provided CYBG with the basis to build deeper, more enduring relationships with its customers; a platform for continuous development and innovation and the mindset and delivery capabilities to position the Bank at the forefront of the digital banking revolution.

The ‘Rethinking banking with Clydesdale B: creating a new digital first bank’ project has been Highly Commended in the Digital & Technology category of the 2017 Management Consultancies Association’s Awards

Find out more about our other MCA Award finalists