ScotiaPersonas

Scotiabank Peru, a banking platform with over 2.5M users, faces challenges in catering to the diverse needs of its heterogeneous user base. Previously, user segmentation was solely income-based. However, through research, the team uncovered behaviors, motivations, and experiences that determined users' financial maturity irrespective of account balances. This led to the creation of ScotiaPersonas, a potent design tool that enables Scotiabank Peru to better serve its customers.

Context

As Scotiabank Peru evolves into the world of digital banking, we struggle to understand who our new customers are and how to offer a strong value proposition according to their financial and personal needs.

Objective

How might we develop a more human-centric way to understand our users' needs and behaviors, beyond their income level?

Action

Hypothesis-generation workshop with stakeholders

We mapped a series of stakeholders in Scotiabank’s Digital Banking. This considered employees from the Product, Business, Engineering, Design, and Marketing teams. Besides getting buy-in for research, we wanted to involve stakeholders in our process, so they’d be active allies and contributors from its origins. Through an online co-creation session, we pitched ScotiaPersonas to our stakeholders and curated a Miro board with a set of questions

We received very insightful responses from the participants, all of them agreeing on the importance of the project and the lack of user understanding. In each of the boards shown below, we categorized the information provided by the workshop’s participants and generated a series of hypotheses we’d seek to test further on in our research process. 

Generative research

Guiding questions for the workshop:

  • Who do you think Scotiabank’s clients are?

  • What information do you consider we yet have to learn about our clients?

  • In what moments do we frustrate or disappoint our clients?

  • What business problems could we solve if we knew our customers better?

After we gathered our stakeholders’ hypotheses, we started our data collection process. To do so, we prioritized two research methods: surveys and interviews. These research methods were carried out with two groups, Scotiabank’s branch representatives and clients.

Participants

Branch representatives:  With an average client portfolio of 30+ people, Scotiabank’s branch representatives have gained insight, built relationships, and maintained constant contact with our clients, as their role consists in understanding their needs, and providing them with an adequate financial assessment.

Clients: What a better way to learn about our clients than through them directly. We posted a recruitment screener in order to access Scotiabank’s clients. The screener considered criteria such as age, location, digital level, bank, and banking products

Considering the numerous branch banking personnel and the knowledge they withhold from working directly with our clients on a daily basis, we designed a survey to collect information from them at scale. We opted to use surveys as they can help gauge the representativeness of individual views among the hundred branch representatives that participated. Through this survey, we sought to gain insight from the banking personnel’s perspective of our clients from different parts of the country. 

Survey

Objective #1: Understand how the branch representatives perceive the behavioral and psychosocial characteristics of our clients.

To do so, we asked branch representatives to categorize the clients in their portfolios. Some guiding questions included:

  • Who are they? How old are they, what do they do for a living, what are their interests

  • What do they need? What are their aspirations, how is the bank an ally to achieve their goals?

  • What do they do? How are their visits to the branch? What is the main product or service they use?

Semi-structured interviews

Objective #2: Learn about our clients' frustrations and disappointments.

We wanted to learn the branch representative’s perception of some of our clients’ most pressing pain points.

Our survey gathered a rich set of 256 branch representatives from over 7 cities in Peru. Their years of experience ranged from 1 to 20 years.

Complement with semi-structued interviews..

Branch representatives:

After generating a preliminary set of user categories from the input of 200+ branch representatives through the survey, we wanted to triangulate that information, as well as continue inquiring qualitatively about their perspective on our clients. We meticulously selected 5 branch representatives for the interviews. They had different years of experience, roles, and locations.

For the context of these interviews, we inspired our research guide from an existing tool, Scotiabank users’ mega journey. We ought to understand the prevalent needs of our users in every step of their journey with us.

Clients:

The following section of our research consisted of client interviews. Our objective was to contrast and complement the information acquired from branch representatives with the information we would get from speaking to our clients directly. To do so, we recruited 12 clients with diverse backgrounds and characteristics, considering different ages, genders, locations, and additional banks they were clients of. Our only inclusion criteria were that they had been clients of Scotiabank for at least 1 year. In that way, we could inquire about who they were as individuals, as well as how it reflects on their relationship with the bank and its products and services.

We took a series of elements to design our interview guide. These included: the hypotheses generated in our stakeholder workshops, as well as the surveys and interviews with branch representatives.

The core categories of our interview guide included:

  • Who our client is

  • Relationship with the Peruvian banking industry

  • Relationship with Scotiabank

  • Relationship with Technology 

Synthesis & Analysis

Affinitization

We started to categorize our findings by highlighting the elements that gave us insight into our clients’ behaviors, motivations, and needs from the notes of each interview. 

Key drivers

Bearing in mind the lifestyles, personalities, and stories shared by our users, we identified a series of drivers that were present in the participants’ lives. It was an important part of our process learning how our clients live outside of the banking ecosystem.

  • • Security - decisions made by the certainty or confidence of what is received

    • Experience - motivation to experience something new

    • Vitality - search for energy and vigor for your life

    • Aspiration - dreaming, imagining, and wishing for something

    • Knowledge - search for knowledge of the things that you acquire according to their context

    • Belonging - need to belong to a social group

    • Health - motivation to maintain a healthy life

    • Challenges - motivation generated by challenging yourself

    • Practicality - act without complications

    • Socialization - seeking to share and relate to people (word of mouth, close circle influence)

    • Balance - seek stability and balance in life

    • Curiosity - desire to try something new and unfamiliar

    • Price - search accessible products and services

We paired the key drivers to each of our users. We started to see a pattern among the drivers that guided these participants’ lives. We also noticed how several behaviors, characteristics, and financial styles were shared among them.

Insights

Once all categories were formed, we continued to analyze and generate conclusions from each cluster. We then proceeded to generate insights through the “5 why” analysis method.

Following the principles of atomic research, after organizing the findings from diverse sources of information, such as the surveys, interviews, and past research, four main insights were generated:

  • The perception that the client has of money influences the mental model and behavior of the person. For example, a perception of money as a volatile good vs. a good that can be worked on and grown.

    “Money is synonymous with tranquility, and this is synonymous with living well”.

    User story: “I am married and have 3 children. At 59 years old, I have already been retired for 5 years. For me, money is synonymous with tranquility, and this is synonymous with living well. That is why all my life I tried hard to work hard. I believe that the sacrifice I made all those years ago, in addition to the proper management of money, has helped me a lot to enjoy and live my retirement peacefully.”

  • Informed decisions for effective resource management mean ensuring the quality of life and well-being in the future. Clients learn from their close environment because they consider it trustworthy and easy to understand, unlike the bank, which is perceived as a complex institution that only looks after their interests.

    "I propose alternatives to the different possible scenarios, evaluate previous experiences, and rely on people I trust to ask for advice."

    User story: “Two years ago I did a master's degree in Barcelona. This has been one of the biggest decisions I have made in my life, given that it was considered a very large investment, in addition to moving to a totally new country. Making the decision took me more than 1 year, and I must confess that it was not something I did by myself. I leaned on people I trust and consulted others about their past experiences. I’m extra cautious if I see that my quality of life can be at risk.”

  • Clients perceive greater peace of mind and security by diversifying their funds in different financial products (assets and liabilities) and banks, both inside and outside of Peru.

    “It is important to diversify money between banks; but before having the money sleeping in an account, I prefer to invest it in businesses and properties."

    User story: “I care more about the money I make than what I spend. For this reason, it is very important for me to diversify the forms of saving and investment. For example, I have products at Scotiabank, BBVA, and Wells Fargo in the US. It seems important to me to diversify the money between banks, but before having the money sleeping in an account, I prefer to invest it in businesses and properties. I really like the tourism and hospitality sector, so I ventured to open an Airbnb in Miami to see how it was. To date, I already have more than three.”

  • Clients are not fully aware of all the services Scotiabank offers to protect their money. That is why they perceive any charge or commission as theft, as long as they do not understand where it comes from.

    “The bank robs at every opportunity it can. With one hand he gives you, but with the other he takes you away. "

    User story: “I migrated to Lima a few years ago and since the pandemic, I lost my job in a travel agency. That represented a total change in my household income. I currently live with my husband and 1-year-old son. Given my current situation, I am forced to use part of our life-long savings to pay the bills for the month. Every Peruvian sol (local currency) counts, and it is difficult for me to understand the improper commissions and charges made by the bank. I don't understand why some transfers have a cost ... are they charging me for using my own money? Also, I do not understand the great disparity between the interest rates they charge you for a loan and the interest rate they pay you to keep your savings in their accounts!”

Results

Introducing the concept of Financial Maturity

Analyzing the research outcomes, we figured out that the concept around which our client’s behaviors and needs towards Scotiabank could be understood was through their level of financial maturity.

In that sense, we defined financial maturity as the characteristics of the development of a person with respect to its relationship to the financial world. These characteristics are evolutionary, and as such are subject to various changes. It may depend on our clients’ experiences, the society they live in, their personal relationships, and of course their relationship with financial institutions.

These characteristics can be analyzed from two perspectives:

User

Bank