Under pressure from disruptive FinTech startups, incumbents like Santander are under greater pressure than ever to innovate.

As one of the biggest names in banking, the Spanish multinational financial services company needed a partner to help them prepare for the future of finance through research and design sprints.

Santander was acutely aware that financial services and banking were undergoing rapid change and that they needed to keep up with the pace of digital innovation.

In particular, they wanted to explore how immersive technology could help to deliver personalised banking to help them attract and retain customers.

Taking advantage of our in-house user research and design expertise, Santander wanted to map out what customers thought about their banking services and how digital innovation was changing their relationship with their customers.

Across multiple design sprints, we worked closely with the Santander team to really understand their business challenges in detail.

From this, we centred our efforts around three core areas: identifying how tech could be used to improve banking on the go, how banking could be more accessible in the home and how to revive banking on the high street.

Our designers, user researchers and technical leads developed ideas and prototypes around concepts including tailored retail experiences through AR, customer service chatbots and AI.

Following the design sprint series, we helped Santander’s innovation team create a 12-month roadmap that provided a digital innovation plan to realise some of these ideas.