How UX strategy unlocks $ billion opportunities
Alliant Credit Union provides fully digital banking experience to members. Its business covers deposit accounts, credit cards, loans and investment services.
Core Team
UX Designer (me)
Product Owner
Web Engineer
Mobile Engineer
$1.8B
Deposits
Growth
91% growth
86%
Completion Rate Growth
43% to 80%
$30M
Monthly External Funding
From $0
Identify the problem and getting it prioritized
Business:
UX:
New HMW:
We wanna grow deposit balance
by allowing members to open multiple Certificate of Deposits (CD) at once.
Quality over quantity
Open multiple CDs at once isn’t really a need
Avg. only 1.9 CD per member
70% of our CD account holders own only 1 CD
Identified problem - CD opening process
Low completion rate: 43%
Lots of complaints from members
HMW improve the completion rate of the CD opening flow?
HMW grow the deposit balance of CD?
Completion rate grew from 43% → 80%.
Designing banking experience meant optimizing for efficiency, trust and precision. Every pixel must earn its place.
Here is how I did it -
Use storytelling to express the following 3 points. Combine with Visual
Design for efficiency
Opening a banking product might feel complicated, and it usually is. Optimizing the efficiency for this CD opening flow soon became my first challenge.
Design for trust
Earning trust from customers is another key for financial UX. The new design makes sure people can get the information they need at any step. What is a CD? What is APY? How to maximize their earning?
Design with precision
Yes, Wizard flow is the trend but All in One page is what our members want.
The last approach is no screte - data driven decisions.
“Why I can’t fund from an external account?”
I knew we had found the gold mountain by seeing our product owner’s face with my question.
External funding -
Simple feature, huge impact
$30M
money flew from other financial institutions to us just for the CD accounts every month.
Yes we grew the deposit, now how do we keep it?
Auto-renewal flag grew from 35.5% → 73.8%.
Avg. $138M of CD balance were renewed with a new term every month
Auto-renewal flag grew from 35.5% → 73.8%.
Over the years, feature creep gone wild,
Subtraction
became the first challenge I met while redesigning the flow.
And among all the decisions to simplify the opening process,
removing the "Maturity Option" from the flow is the toughest.
The CD will default to Auto-renew after the member opens it. Although they can change the maturity option to “close the Cert and transfer funds” later, it’s still a very sneaky move to me. Felt I betrayed the users whom I was supposed to speak for. Yet, it helps the business. Our Auto-Renew Flag shows a dramatic increase:
35.5% → 73.8%
One of the challenges but my favorite parts of this project is there’s
No Reference
The existing flow has no UX foundation. And it’s the very first time for Alliant to design a modern banking product opening process.
What does the look and feel should be? How do I present options and information? Most importantly,
what’s the best practice of the UX for a banking product opening process?
Some answers come out quickly: Simple, hierarchy, pre-populated fields..etc. What about the flow? My guts told me Wizard flow it is. It’s a trend to apply Wizard flow to form applications. It helps users to focus on one question at a time, preventing chances of being overwhelming and confusing.
Then the testing result showed I was totally wrong. Users prefer a one-page experience. 62.5% of testers said one-page experience is easier to read, more in control and, interestingly, faster. Which they were totally wrong and didn’t realize it.
One-page: 1m 50s
Wizard: 1m 22s
08
Challenge 5: Biggest fail
Been asked for solution during
meeting
Ch. 1 Old version is outdated
Feature creep gone wild
As one of the largest credit unions in the United States, Alliant Credit Union has more than 850,000 members in 2024, a 55% increase over 2020.
Its online banking (OLB) website - designed more than 10 years ago, struggled to scale alongside the growth of the company. Fundamental usability was challenged. Features and information competed for focus.
Opening a CD account is frustrating.
CH2.
My Role
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Assets
Goal: Deposit Grow
40% growth on new account openings per month
(7K to 10K)150M+ deposit growth per month
30M+ funding flow from other financial institutes per month
86% growth in completion rate
Goal: Deposit Retain
57% more CD set to auto-renew
35% of CD products were renewed and retained 138M deposit in February.
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