Easier, better mobile banking

NatWest chose to partner with us to revolutionize how the bank serves its banking customers — who represent 31% of the business banking customers in the UK. That revolution would start by building a brand-new app that would solidify NatWest’s position as the market leader.

The result? Bankline Mobile: A 4.5-star-rated, highly accessible app that unified the business and delighted customers in a fiercely competitive banking environment. Its intuitive UX and UI affords users the ability to manage their accounts and transactions safely, securely and efficiently around the clock.

In addition to Bankline Mobile, we worked collaboratively to deliver change across the bank by embedding agile ways of working, uniting disciplines and eliminating waste.

With our experienced feet firmly planted in the financial services industry, NatWest trusted Valtech to:

• Quickly and efficiently set a new standard for mobile experiences at NatWest and RBS.

• Radically improve the user experience of Bankline compared to its pre-existing web platform.

• Create a culture of increased agility to facilitate continuous improvements throughout the business.

We have a huge amount of experience innovating financial services

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Replacing the card reader with biometric technology, we built the UK’s first PSD2-compliant payment solution that helps customers securely and conveniently approve multi-million-pound payments — reducing user journey time for approvals by 80%.

From Day One, the product vision and timescales meant that unification and collaboration were crucial to enable success for a co-located Bankline Mobile team.

A common goal, vision and ways of working forged the bond between Valtech and our multidisciplinary co-workers at NatWest, unifying different disciplines from across the bank — from technology, change, design, product and the business.

Multiple viewpoints can make for unique challenges in a co-located team. Our self-organization and honest collaboration between junior and senior colleagues ensured we could focus and refocus to deliver the first beta release in just 12 weeks.

This not only minimized waste, but also maximized the impact the app had on stakeholders, other digital teams at NatWest and RBS, and their customers. The team shared responsibility for quality assurance, deploying extensive testing automation and continuous integration throughout the development process.

How do we know this worked? The security team at NatWest vetted it against their global security standards, and its robustness saw it through without a hitch. What’s more, the crash-free rate remained at 99.8% from the day of the first iPhone beta release through to its first six months in the App Store.

More than 20 app updates were collaboratively built throughout 2018. Bankline Mobile was launched to the public on iPhone in November 2018 and on Android in March 2019.

From the first question we asked to the last test we ran before the launch, we kept customers at the center of the entire process. By collecting crucial feedback from 100 early adopters of the beta product, we were able to iteratively create a final product that truly met the needs of NatWest’s UK business banking customers.

NatWest already had a solid body of user studies and analysis to use as a foundation. Our experienced designers and developers, together with NatWest, conducted 28 user studies with 11 distinct research methods and released 20 beta updates to 1,000 pilot users.

We know we can only create something people love by involving them in the process of creating it, so our designers and developers worked to their high and established standards of accessibility with the end user front-of-mind at all times.

 

12 Weeks to launch beta iOS app

20 Updates over 12 months

4.5 stars App Store rating

4.1 stars Google Play Store rating

1st World first automated testing of TouchID/FaceID on iOS

1st Industry first payment approval via Touch ID/Face ID on iOS and Android

In February 2020, the Bankline Mobile app won both Best Initiative in Digital Payments and Best Industry Innovation of the Year at the Card and Payment Awards, which recognize excellence and innovation in card and payment solutions across the UK and Ireland.

Beyond the build and launch of Bankline Mobile, Valtech worked with NatWest to seed and embed ways of working across the bank to:

• Pioneer a user-centred approach that has fast become the new norm within the bank.

• Champion a culture of continuous improvement through eight-week prototyping sprints that inspired innovative new features and constant affordable improvements.

• Stimulate change at NatWest by helping to establish Communities of Practice to support craft skills development and in-house capabilities.

• Increase efficiency through agile ways of working, encouraging new ways of looking at processes, and self-organization via coaching and workshops.

• Expose inefficiencies throughout product development and collaborated with RBS to eliminate waste and deliver savings of tens of thousands of pounds, and tens of thousands of hours of labor.

• Facilitate better communication and collaboration across the business, breaking down organizational silos.

• Increase knowledge-sharing across RBS through a series of expert-led events and seminars on connected organizations and our own strategic take on Voice UI.