The future of corporate banking

Danske Bank

District turns financial data into actionable insights for companies of all sizes. District is not a product but an eco-system that allow companies to setup their interface to meet any of their daily financial tasks. Between 2017-2020 I have designed, scaled and released experiences to more than 315.000 users across 8 countries.

Designing the platform

While designing District we quickly realised that we needed to expand component behaviour and add new components in order to create an eco-system that allows best-in-class corporate banking experiences. Apart from scaling the components we also scaled in workforce and to maintain the coherent user experience the District experience framework was created.

While designing the interface for District I started to collect all components, component behaviour and best practices to form the District experience framework. One document to contain all documentation, so any designer or developer would have the maximum amount of knowledge and experience for any component.

All components where following the same documentation structure to encapsulate all knowledge and best practices:

• Anatomy
• Variations
• Component behaviour
• Micro behaviour
• Sizes
• Example

We designed four ways products could engage with the user in District. Widgets for high level information, panels as reasoning layer for widget information, workspaces for full details or working with your financial data and finally exposing your data for other products to consume. Widgets can be combined to create dashboards that enables specific insights or an overall overview of your financial situation that enables you to take more informed financial decissions.

Introducing your new financial companion

Together with the internal advertising agency of Danske Bank we created a video to get customers excited about the migration to District - while having the option to use the video in marketing material for new customers. The video focuses on telling the story of a new platform with greater flexibility and new experiences that allow for more informed financial decisions.

Broaden your financial horizon

District’s new platform allowed us to redesign how users connect and integrate data from other platforms into their financial overview. Through our customer and user centrict approach we learned that users hesitate to connect to a bank in fear of what their advisors can see. This learning is matching one of our guiding principles of transparency.

Creating connections in a eco-system we added two layers to the connections. The first layer being the connection to the platform, the second layer being the solution having consent to consume data from the connection. The user can monitor, manage and delete their connections in the connection workspace.

Welcoming new users

The individual welcoming and training of new users varies a lot, some are being trained by their colleague others by the advisor from Danske Bank. We wanted to streamline the welcoming experience to make sure all users were offered the most basic knowledge to District and remove dependicies such as opening hours and the knowledge of the person training you. But getting something new is not always easy, it often means you have to invest extra hours to learn new functions, interfaces and flows - And it’s certainly not everyone who enjoys the extra effort. Knowing this the scope of welcoming and training to include an unboxing experience to get people excited and a reward experience to aknowledge the hard work invested.

One of the best feelings i know is to unbox whatever gadget i’ve just bought, opening the box you’ve waited for, unfolding the wrapper, seeing the it glare, turning it on and finally start using it. Some of those feeling are encouraged while “turning on” District for the very first time and thereby getting the unboxing experience.

The level of training needed is very individual, so the welcoming experience is designed to match the engagement of the user. It ranges from full assist, which is the video tutorials, to minimal assist, which is a few notes on the interface. The video tutorials takes the user through all of the basic functionality of the platform and when the user has seen all of the videos we reward their progress with the celebration experience. If the user choses the minimal assist, three notes will be shown sequencially and highlight the core of District.