Opening Accounts Remotely

As of winter 2020, RBC Royal Bank identified 500,000 customers as ones who strictly rely on physical branch locations to perform banking task, like opening an account. It was our early assumption that the people who visit a branch to open an account are possibly less technically-inclined and therefore less interested in using a self-serve application.

The bank had been planning to create the ability for customers to open an account with the virtual or remote help of an advisor at some point in the future. And due to branch closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, we now had at least half a million customers who could no longer reach us.

With that in mind, we were tasked with creating a minimum-viable-product that would allow the advisors who worked in branches (and were now working from home) to open accounts remotely.

In the absence of time for generative research, we settled for usability testing with advisors to make sure we were enabling them to perform their job without interruption. Because our time was limited, we had to contend with technical limitations that meant building a flow full of workarounds and hacks. Still, it was better than any current solution at advisors’ disposal, and from their perspective, it was a success.

We knew we were still missing a key piece of insight, though: what would customers think of this potentially disjointed experience? After all, these customers were choosing to book appointments with advisors rather than using our self-serve online applications. We knew that they preferred an assisted experience, but now, because of some technical limitations, we needed them to perform some tasks in the account opening process (like ID verification through the mobile app) themselves.

After delivering on the MVP, we started performing some generative testing to learn more about the group of people we were designing for.

Through interviews with our targeted audience, it became clear that these were often not individuals who needed any kind of technical support, but rather, people who preferred the social and traditional aspect of meeting face-to-face with a human being. They were looking for connection, not for help.

This freshly-launched project is open for improvement and iteration. We’re currently in the research synthesis phase and will be using our findings to inform future releases and help with feature prioritization. The first order of business is to find ways of enabling the connection our customers so crave. In interviews, they told us they felt like an advisor could better understand them and thus recommend more relevant products in the branch setting. We’re currently mulling over how we might mimic this discovery phase in the remote context.