Ent Credit Union - Sean McCarthy

Home Information Process

Improving members' financial quality of life through digital financial wellness.

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Involvement

PLATFORM : Web, iOS & Android
ROLE : Sr. Experience Designer

Strategy & Vision
Research & Testing
UX / UI Design
Visual Design
Figma Component Library

Overview

Ent Credit Union is Colorado's largest credit union and 5th largest financial institution by assets. As they were looking forward to the next 15 years of growth they needed to invest in their digital offering and formed an Experience Design & Digital Product team. Our team was charged with elevating the digital banking product to be competitive with a modern experience that consumers are becoming more and more used to.

Not only are we a new function in a 65-year-old organization, but we are also introducing and educating the value of design-led thinking across the org to create a more design-driven organization. This included building a design team and wearing the hat of DesignOps (Notion, Maze, User Interviews, Figma, Design Critiques, etc) to help us all act synchronously.

What could it be?

After a year of interacting with stakeholders, member interviews, a 2-week vision sprint with IDEO, countless competitive research, and an endless reading list of articles & reports, we started to envision what a 'dream app' would look like for Ent.

We started with uncovering what our members were trying to accomplish (JTBD), solidifying design principles to guide us, and overlapping it all with research from Bain & Company's Elements of Value for Consumer Banking.

According to a KeyBank survey, digital tools are the third most important factor that helps make consumers feel financially resilient. This means breaking the paradigm that credit unions are just cheap banks that offer lower fees to creating a digital offering that actually walks the talk that credit unions advertise.

The work into creating this new digital future required challenging assumptions in the onboarding & account opening journey, the core function of digital banking (a general ledger or system of record to purpose-built software to increase the member's financial quality of life), and how the credit union and member engage with one another.

Onboarding & Account Opening Exploration

Ent was preparing to move towards a new digital platform, so we decided to optimize the onboarding journey using their system. This included the ability to open an account natively from the mobile app instead of being redirected to a web view. And with the increase in Fintechs and Neobanks entering the mobile market, as well as Ent expanding into other metros in Colorado, we felt we needed to create a smoother account opening journey to attract and retain customers—including a younger audience who might find themselves only using mobile banking and never shadow a brick & mortar. This includes utilizing native functionality and introducing more personalization through the flow to mimic our bread & butter—in-person account opening.

Core App Architecture

Software is only as amazing as the people engineering and designing it. It takes extreme rigor to understand why the people who use your product use it. What brought them here? What keeps them? Where are areas of opportunity that might delight them? With this concept, we architected your money in the order of what you check most often while being guided by this idea of 'thumb banking'—being able to access everything with how far your thumb can reach (classic mobile-first approach, right?). And instead of bolting on widgets, cards, divs, and carousels, we decided to embed marketing engagements and nudges where you might be looking in the first place.

Altogether, we wanted the app to help you do something, not just glance at balances. And I'm a firm believer that organising your money is a key practice that helps you spend more mindfully and save more easily.

The following images are taken from a Figma prototype I built to demo while presenting to key leadership and stakeholders when discussing Ent's digital future.