Surviving the FinTech Apocalypse: A Guide for Retail Banking Teams

Welcome to the Apocalypse (we hope you enjoy your stay)

There's a company in Texas selling prefab doomsday bunkers at $400K a pop, with nuclear blast hatches, gun vault doors, escape hatches—the works. Whether you share their clients’ concerns about societal collapse, there’s no denying that an actual doomsday event would require a very different set of tools to survive. Think less Uber Eats and more canned preservatives.

Because that’s how the Apocalypse works. There’s some major catastrophe or a chain of events that wipes out the status quo and forces a total reset on the rules. 

This is happening right now in retail banking. 

After a decade of FinTech disruption, the financial landscape has changed dramatically—along with customer expectations. For retail banks, that means defending your territory from lean, mean, digital-first disruptors who are gobbling up customers with lower rates, glossy apps and niche products they can push to market faster.

But hope is not lost. Retail banks have some serious advantages over FinTech organizations. In fact, if we’re talking bunkers, yours is a whole lot bigger. But there are deep cracks in the crevices—legacy systems and practices undermining critical fortifications and giving the competition enough wiggle room to do some serious damage.

All that ends now. Product, marketing and CX teams at retail banks are on the frontlines and uniquely positioned to co-op FinTech’s weapons of choice: customer-centricity and adaptability. Both are equally critical to survive in this brave new world of fickle customers and fleeting deposits—and time is of the essence. You can’t afford to sit around and wait on some multi-year organizational transformation to go head-to-head with your scrappy competitors.

The good news is, you don’t have to. There are still ways you can adapt and respond to challengers—by using their own methodologies against them. That’s where this trusty survival guide comes in. You'll learn:

Let’s jump in!

Three key rules for survival

In 2021, Jamie Dimon—Chairman and CEO of J.P. Morgan—warned shareholders that intense competition from FinTech “diminishing” the role of banks. 

He wasn’t wrong. 

The thing is, to endure harsh climates, you need a very specific set of tools—no one is bringing desert gear to Antarctica. So, let’s start with a quick lay of the land and what it actually takes to survive. When it comes to the FinTech Apocalypse, we’re looking at a deeply fractured financial landscape that operates under a whole new set of rules:

1. Seamless digital experiences are a non-negotiable.

Consumer platforms like Netflix, Amazon and Spotify have dramatically influenced customer expectations for digital interactions. It’s not just about slick interfaces or bug-free apps. We’re talking hyper-relevant offerings and proactive personal recommendations wrapped in one cohesive, delightful and intuitive digital experience.

Just look at the surging popularity of embedded finance, which Bain Capital predicts will make up 10% of total financial transactions by 2026—a $7 trillion market.

This is no coincidence. It’s a reflection of the instant gratification era, where customers demand value in as few steps as possible. Why yes, I would like to insure this $10K geothermal power generator for my nuclear bunker before I check out—thank you Best Buy!

2. Traditional boundaries no longer exist

FinTech is now firmly planted in retail banking territory. Free from exorbitant overhead—branch and contact center networks comprise roughly 40% of retail banks’ costs—startups are luring customers away with highly competitive products like zero-commission brokerages and high-yield savings accounts.

This isn’t exactly a new development. A few years ago, CB Insights described the great “unbundling” of the American bank, with legions of disruptors chipping away at core banking functions and offerings. The trend has only accelerated—the global fintech industry has nearly doubled its revenue since 2017 and there are currently almost 30,000 fintech companies worldwide.

However, it’s not just fintech startups ignoring traditional borders, but the tech world at large. Apple’s “walled garden”—the tightly controlled ecosystem spanning hardware, software and services—has integrated a suite of financial products to ensure smooth integration and compatibility for their customers. In 2019, Apple partnered with Goldman Sachs to launch Apple Card, which swelled to 6.4 million cardholders within two years. There’s also their digital wallet—Apple Pay—and BNPL service Apple Later.

Amazon has similarly encroached on banking country, although their initial foray came from the commercial end. In 2011, Amazon launched Amazon Lending to offer merchant loans—receivables hit $1.3 billion by the end of 2023, shortly before the company announced it would cease underwriting.

However, Amazon has also challenged retail banking products with their own digital wallet, Amazon Pay, and the now defunct Amazon Cash, which enabled customers to add money to their Amazon balance at over 30,000 participating grocery, drug and convenience stores. Brain previously estimated that an Amazon banking service could swell to 70 million US consumer relationships within five years.

A slew of retail banks have responded to the advancing competition by slashing overdraft fees, a hefty revenue stream. In 2019, overdraft and non-sufficient funds (NSF) fees generated over $12 billion per year in the U.S. alone. This hasn’t made a difference—not really. While national banks saw a slight increase in customer satisfaction in 2023, better rates have continually driven customers to alternative providers:

• 50% of national bank customers in the U.S. have a secondary deposit account with an Internet-only financial institution.

• The majority (77%) of consumers using a traditional bank say that they keep some of their funds elsewhere.

We’re now living in the age of silent attrition, where customers retain their primary bank accounts while hauling their deposits to higher-yield pastures. Which brings us to rule #3…

3. Customers are loyal to no one.

The vast majority of customers (90%) prefer to manage their money in one place. Retail banks—with their wide array of options and “one-stop-shop” convenience—should be a no-brainer. Yet the average consumer uses six financial products, only half of which are with their main bank.

This hardly seems ideal, but when you think about it, customers don’t really have a choice. In addition to higher rates, the storm of fractured insights behind the scenes at retail banks makes it impossible for customers to enjoy a consistently relevant, effortless and integrated experience on the other end.

While FinTech has swooped in with smoother apps and more competitive pricing, startups can’t offer the same scope of products and services. Subsequently, customers have been forced to duct tape together their own end-to-end, top-to-bottom ecosystem for personal finance, using a mishmash of products and services, which they’re continually enhancing and expanding.

No matter how you slice it, customers have higher standards—and more choices—than ever.

How FinTech is trying to stop you

Your FinTech competitors are all grown up and show no signs of slowing down. The FinTech market is projected to swell to $1.5 million in annual revenue by 2030—a 6X increase from 2023. Common strategies for edging out retail banks include:

Designing more customer-centric experiences

While retail banks have been forced to keep up with customer expectations using legacy systems and clunky backends, FinTech platforms were purpose-built for seamless digital interactions from the start. Think about BNPL products like Klarna, Affinity, Affirm, PayPal and Afterpay, which effortlessly integrate with the digital checkout process.

The ease and accessibility isn’t limited to a particular flow, portfolio or interaction—it’s a continual, recurring convenience, whether you’re buying a high-ticket appliance or splitting up your latest Instacart haul from Costco.

Where retail banks frequently fall short is through isolated optimization efforts—what the Boston Consulting Group calls “fragmented investments across silos” that either maintain the status quo or achieve only incremental improvements, rather than providing a holistically exceptional experience for each individual customer, from offerings to interface.

This shouldn’t be happening. Not when banks have the ability to capture and refine every last click, tap and swipe. The issue is the process behind those optimization efforts, with countless tools, dashboards and reports dispersing gallons of data across several functions—all of which can significantly influence the customer experience.

While you’re entrenched in product analytics, DevOps is combing through error logs, CX is digging into customer satisfaction scores and marketing is over there with some web analytics platform you’ve probably never laid eyes on. Now multiply that by multiple business lines, portfolios and programs.

Everyone winds up buried in data, but those critical insights necessary to actually understand and improve the digital customer experience—not to mention hit your targets—are eternally out of reach. You can see what is happening in your respective domain, but may not have the full picture or context to understand why.

For example, are folks ignoring that spiffy new savings tracker because it takes too long to load? Or are you promoting it the wrong segment—like high net worth individuals already working with a relationship manager?

Successful FinTech disruptors have gained their biggest advantage here by focusing optimization efforts on a top-to-bottom digital customer experience, rather than improving a particular channel or product line in isolation.

Keith Darter, VP, Financial Services at Glassbox shares four critical steps to optimizing digital banking journeys.

Running lean

FinTech companies have gained a serious advantage from traditional hierarchy and siloes at retail banks, which ultimately hinder the ability to respond to shifting market dynamics and customer behavior.

Just take a look at the battle for deposits. Surging costs of living, pandemic-depleted savings, prolonged inflation and sky-high interest rates have created a perfect storm that essentially slashed consumer demands for products like loans and mortgages, placing an even greater strain on deposits as a revenue source. 

The languid pace of product development—it takes global banks three months on average to release a new product or update an existing one, compared to daily releases common at startups—forces a constant game of catchup with FinTech disruptors, whose rates are already more competitive to begin with.

Niching down—then expanding

FinTech has traditionally focused on smaller offerings in niches they can dominate. "The primary financial institution relationship is very difficult to defend," says Gabe Krajicek, CEO, Kasasa.  "I used to describe the mega banks as the big killer whales. And now you’ve also got the piranha of just thousands of Fintech companies that provide niche services that dis-intermediate little components of what the primary financial institution relationship would otherwise provide."

However, if the new rules of survival have taught us anything, it’s that you can’t expect your competitors to stay in their lane. The pace of innovation has enabled FinTech startups to get creative with partnerships to quickly expand their offerings, while companies like SoFi and Square have successfully obtained national bank charters. SoFi also flipped the script on the startup buying frenzy by retail banks, acquiring Golden Pacific Bancorp and subsidiary Golden Pacific Bank for $750 million in 2022.

Turning your legacy against you

One thing retail banks have that FinTech startups don’t? Longstanding reputations—and customer relationships, often spanning decades. But lackluster digital experiences and insufficient personalization have given startups the perfect opportunity to tap into customer frustration and help shift the narrative.

Wealthfront, for example, touts itself as the ultimate anti-bank: “Branches served a purpose in the age before smartphones, but they were and still are expensive to staff and maintain… We don’t have an antiquated network of expensive retail branches costing us $600,000 to $800,000 each year, so we don’t need to get that $34 to $46 (or more!) from you.”

It’s not just about products and services, but the broader story. Banks are frequently positioned from trusted institutions to stodgy, uncaring, out of touch, old-fashioned, even unnecessary. Or as Bill Gates famously declared back in 1997: “The world needs banking. It doesn’t need banks.”

FinTech’s three big vulnerabilities

For all their innovation, those sleek, sexy FinTech startups are also struggling to survive this brave new world. And they have some serious hurdles standing in their way.

Death of “grow or die”

There’s no denying that the past couple years have been especially brutal for the tech industry—FinTech included. Inflation caused FinTech valuations to plummet as much as 79% by March 2024, while high-profile brands like PayPal, Block, Square, Cash App and Afterpay announced rounds of layoffs.

Like the tech world at large, FinTech companies will be pressured to shift gears and focus on profitable, sustainable growth moving forward. That means doubling down on customer retention—specifically CX, as the ultimate form of future-proofing.

We predict traditional financial institutions will likely see an even smaller margin for error when it comes to quality digital experiences and relevant offerings, as FinTech continues to invest in CX and customer expectations rise even further.

Reg👏u👏la👏shunz

Rapid growth has come with increased scrutiny, calls for regulation and even litigation. Visa, for example, was forced to scrap a $5.3 billion acquisition of Plaid following an antitrust lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Financial service providers are also feeling the heat to improve risk management practices as they grow. This can stall the pace of innovation, as startups are forced to navigate these complexities and work with regulators outside of the lean, agile environments they’re used to.

Fewer offerings

Startups have frequently relied on partnerships to bolster their offerings. In some ways, this has been an advantage, giving them the ability to focus on shiny apps and robust data integration, without getting bogged down with compliance and licensing. However, that also means these products aren’t fully theirs. For example, when Goldman Sachs decided to pull the plug on Apple Card in 2024, there wasn’t much Apple could do.

Retail banks, on the other hand, have the capability of providing anything customers could possibly need at every stage, all under one roof. “We pay close attention to the competitive threat of fintechs, but no fintech can match the breadth of these solutions or the trust and security we provide,” says Jennifer Piepszak, Co-CEO of Consumer and Community Banking at Chase Bank.

Just imagine how much damage you could do combining that exhaustive supply of products and services with hyper-relevant offerings and deeply personal recommendations, all delivered with laser-precision to the individual customer, in one cohesive, effortless experience that feels like it was custom built just for them.

"Fintech may evoke exotic crypto investment vehicles, gamified trading apps like Robinhood or AI-fueled platforms such as Upstart, which seeks to bypass credit scores in the loan business," writes Monika Brown for UCLA Anderson Review. "But it also refers to a multitude of technologies that speed up, simplify and improve visibility of data in the financial realm (a lot of it unseen by consumers and other customers). An older business platform — be it Ford, Target or Bank of America — has enormous embedded costs in its business model and thus many opportunities to use technology to improve.

Why top-level survival tactics will fail without you

Now, chances are, your leadership team is all over this whole FinTech Apocalypse thing. And they should be. Meaningful change starts from the top—the onus isn’t on you to shift decades of traditional banking culture and organizational structure.

However, on the opposite end of the spectrum, lofty ideas which stay at the top will never become anything more. Organizations—retail banks included—need participation on the team level in order to truly adapt and survive.

Leaders can talk about digital transformation until they’re blue in the face, but nothing will make a difference if teams have secretly resigned to the status quo and accepted all the bureaucracy, red tape and silos as part and parcel of working in a retail bank. For all its complexity, corporate culture boils down to “how we do things around here.”

That’s where you come in.

"We often see companies investing heavily in consultants and strategists to craft a grand plan for digital transformation. The blueprint is detailed, the vision is inspiring and the promise of a digitally empowered future is captivating. But here's the catch — when it's time to roll up the sleeves and get down to implementation, the budget has often run dry, or the grand ideas simply don't translate into practical solutions," says Iztok Smolic, Managing Director of Agile Drop.

"Here's a thought — what if we flipped the script? What if we prioritized building over strategizing? We're not saying to forget about planning. But maybe it's time to change how we approach digital changes. Maybe it's time to focus more on the doing and less on the planning."

Acquisitions

Fintech acquisitions have become a go-to strategy for retail banks looking to expand their digital capabilities, innovate offerings and absorb the competition. In March 2022, for example, Goldman Sachs finalized its acquisition of Greensky, a BNPL loan platform, to the tune of $2.2 billion. Capital One has acquired no fewer than 16 FinTech startups as of 2024, while JPMorgan Chase is investing a whopping $12 billion a year in technology, including fintech acquisitions and partnerships.

But acquisitions don’t address the structural challenges that make retail banks so vulnerable to FinTech disruptors in the first place. In fact, dropping a lean, mean, tech product in bureaucratic environment can cause a lot of problems, including:

• Flight of the talent: Many FinTech innovators got their start in big banks, but struggled with the traditional, risk-averse culture. Without making space for agile teams to operate and integrate, employee churn is inevitable.

• Product demise: Heavily siloed environments are the perfect place for great products to wither and die—especially if they were initially built through rapid cycles of iteration, customer feedback and improvement.

• Isolated labs: Buying up FinTech startups and sticking them in an internal “lab” may seem like a good idea in theory, since it gives them the ability to maintain their scrappy culture. But sub-terrains are often just siloes in disguise, making it impossible to effectively integrate across multiple lines of business. There’s a reason why 50-90% of internal startups fail.

Partnerships

Nearly half of banks (42%) have participated in a FinTech partnership. However, similar to acquisitions, the real benefits only come from a collaborative environment, where cross-functional teams can consistently share insights necessary to provide real value to customers. 

Successful FinTech companies build products around a deep understanding of ongoing customer journeys, not just what’s happening in the immediate session with a specific product or feature. Without addressing the underlying foundation or processes, retail banks will be diametrically at odds with any FinTech partner they try to work with.

Survival tool: the Agile methodology

Making necessary changes to more effectively understand your customers—and survive the FinTech Apocalypse—can feel daunting.

To survive the FinTech Apocalypse, you need to understand your customers better and faster than your competitors. In a retail bank, that likely requires process changes at multiple levels. The whole thing can feel daunting, especially when you don’t have any control over stakeholders, budget or organizational structure.

What you do have some control over (hopefully) is how you operate, either individually or as a team. This is where you can do some serious damage and start seeing results, even if the rest of your organization hasn’t caught up yet.

The first tool in your survival toolkit is the same one your FinTech disruptors use to quickly deliver customer-centered products and experiences. If you work in product, marketing or even CX, you’re probably at least somewhat familiar with the Agile framework. 

Generally speaking, this means:

While seven out of ten U.S. companies have adopted Agile practices in some form, it's still heavily associated with tech. Maybe that’s why, in some ways, Agile seems incompatible with more traditional, risk-adverse environments.

Take Mark Zuckerberg’s famous mantra, “Move fast and break things”. Sure, it’s a solid tribute to the fail fast/learn fast element of agile philosophy. But it also seems to belong to a time and place that’s diametrically opposed to a large bank—when Meta was still Facebook, unprofitable unicorn companies received bajillion dollar valuations, executives had funky titles like Master of Coin and standard work attire consisted of hoodies and Allbirds.

But when you really think about it, agile is actually about minimizing risk, not mindlessly chucking things at the wall to see what sticks. The methodology was developed by a group of engineers as an alternative to the sluggish, top-down “waterfall” approach dominating software development in the early aughts. Completed products were released à la “grand reveal”, with zero customer feedback along the way. As a result, organizations had to rely on guesswork to place big bets and ultimately receive a pass/fail grade, depending on the product’s reception.

The solution didn’t come from the top, it came from the trenches—the teams responsible for rolling up their sleeves and executing, who discovered a way to validate theories and assumptions before allocating hefty resources to development.

5 things you need to be agile in retail banking

At its core, an agile mentality pushes you out of your comfort zone (and product line) to work across multiple teams and change course when necessary to provide the most value to your customers. What that actually looks like in practice will vary wildly on your role, relationships, resources and level of executive support. That being said, there are a few things successful agile teams have in common:

1. The right mindset

Agile has a tendency to attract intense debate around specific frameworks, implementation, even definitions of the the methodology itself. Kanban. Scrum. Scrumban. SAFe. And of course, the dreaded Agilefall. At its core, however, we believe Agile is a mindset, more than anything else—one that pushes you out of your comfort zone of hardwired plans and enables you to switch course and adapt to new information, working across teams to collectively deliver as much value to customers as possible.

That’s the reason why true Agile doesn’t exclusively belong to tech companies—or IT departments. You can borrow and adapt agile principles wherever you work, even in more traditional or bureaucratic environments.

2. Constant breakdowns

On Agile teams, breakdowns are a good thing—at least where large, complex projects are concerned. Working on batches of smaller, more mangeable tasks doesn’t just improve efficiency, though. The real benefit comes from earlier and more frequent access to customer feedback, which can then inform decision making.

That’s why the framework is so powerful. If you can implement effectively, Agile will take customer-centricity from abstract idea to tangible series of actions. “An idea is an abstraction that won’t produce change until you provide people with specific, practical ways to put it into everyday use,” says John Butman, a contributor for Harvard Business Review.

However, it’s not just the projects that get broken down, but the teams as well. One notable example is Amazon’s concept of “two-pizza” teams:

3. Consistent communication

Agile teams often meet in daily stand ups to share insights, tackle problems and stay on the same page. This may not always be feasible across multiple business or product lines. However, you can benefit from the same philosophy by increasing the number of touchpoints between stakeholders. In addition in-person and virtual meetings, you can collaborate more effectively with stakeholders by:

4. A central source of truth 

Customer journeys is fluid, complex and constantly evolving beyond the realm of neat and tidy business lines, programs or functional divides. This is impossible to effectively capture—let alone improve—unless teams have a way to safely, reliably and effectively share information. That’s where a central source of truth comes in. There are multiple ways to do this, including dashboard and DIY.

Dashboard

At Glassbox, our teams work with a common dashboard that automatically captures and consolidates data from several sources, each documenting a different element of the digital customer journey—like struggle scores, satisfaction scores and 100% of customer interactions and technical events that occured in any particular session.

Some metrics will be more familiar to stakeholders than others—for instance, Marketing would need to convene with DevOps if they’re trying to figure out Ajax calls. The main point, though, is that everyone has a shared 360-degree view of the digital customer experience, even if different teams drill into their respective metrics later on. This is the best way we’ve found to gain those critical deeper insights without losing the forest for the trees.

DIY

If you currently don’t have the budget or buy-in for a designated tool to connect the dots across digital customer journeys, take a cue from your startup competitors and get scrappy by creating your own prototype. 

A standard spreadsheet works just fine as a makeshift dashboard for teams to drop links to their latest reports. You can also opt for a simple shared Word doc or Teams thread, where stakeholders can contribute insights, trends or observations from their respective channels. 

That way, when it’s time for a more robust tool, you’ll already be in the habit of comparing notes.

5. Customer feedback

At the end of the day, Agile’s success as a framework—when implemented correctly—doesn’t come from the increased efficiency, but the laser-focus on providing value to customers. The pace of innovation is a natural byproduct of frequently collecting customer feedback and baking it into the product.

Examples of agile in retail banking

J.P. Morgan: Eye of the swarm

J.P. Morgan has been extremely vocal about the threat global banks face from FinTech competitors, so it’s no surprise they’ve embraced agile practices. JPMorgan has also gotten creative with organizational structure—the bank previously appointed 25 “mini CEOs” to operate its tech divisions like startups, managing around 50,000 technologists

However, there has also been innovation on a much smaller scale. The Asset Management team previously followed a traditional release cycle for their equities desk product, with formal handoffs and extensive software changes culminating in a big release at the end of the quarter. There was also little collaboration between development and operations teams. This approach wasn’t working.

“Each release carried a lot of risk and could lead to expensive rollbacks if problems cropped up,” says Danny Myers, Head of Equities Production Management, J.P. Morgan Asset Management. He decided to shift gears and adapt a more agile approach, following a multi-step process:

ING: Agile squads

ING kicked off their agile transformation back in 2015, after identifying a need to boost collaboration and customer-centricity. "Customer behavior… was rapidly changing in response to new digital distribution channels, and customer expectations were being shaped by digital leaders in other industries, not just banking," says Bart Schlatman, former COO, ING Netherlands. “We needed to stop thinking traditionally about product marketing and start understanding customer journeys in this new omnichannel environment. It’s imperative for us to provide a seamless and consistently high-quality service.”

Schlatman was inspired by tech companies like Zapos and Spotify, especially the engineering culture: “They work in small teams that are united in a common purpose, follow an agile ‘manifesto’ , interact closely with customers, and are constantly able to reshape what they are working on.”

The bank established a series of teams or “tribes'' across different domains, like mortgages, securities and private lending. These tribes were then broken down into self-steering, cross-functional “squads'' with up to nine members, including marketing, product and commercial specialists, as well as UX designers, data analysts and IT engineers. Each squad was responsible for a specific customer need—like building or improving a mobile app feature. They stayed together until that task was complete—meeting daily, running experiments, collaborating and managing their own handoffs.

The experiment was so successful, ING rolled it out to more than 40,000 international employees within two years. Their agile transformation has also been widely studied, including at Harvard Business School.

Survival tool: Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD)

Another critical tool to swipe from your competitors’ survival kit is the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) framework. It’s based on a simple philosophy that customers “hire” products or services to accomplish specific jobs. These are typically expressed as a single sentence “job statement” describing a particular process. For example, the “job” you might hire a wire transfer service to perform could be Sending money to another person quickly and safely. The more detail you can add to a JTBD statement, the better. Note the adverbs “quickly” and “safely” capture more insight into what your customer wants, needs and values.

The JTBD framework doesn’t just identify underlying motivation for customer decisions and behavior. It also provides a systemized approach to customer-centricity, so you can tap into the same mindset behind those hyper-personalized FinTech experiences. Or, as Harvard Business Magazine put it: “It transforms our understanding of customer choice in a way that no amount of data ever could, because it gets at the causal driver behind a purchase.”

While typical customer journeys start with what your bank offers through different business lines, JTBD-based journeys are built around what the customer actually needs.

"Managing our personal finances is a complex process. Some people have unpredictable and variable income. Some have shared financial responsibilities. And some people are hard up and need to budget daily to ensure they stay in the black," says Ryan Garner, Strategy Director, 11FS. "Life is unpredictable and how we spend our money can be impulsive and emotional. This makes it difficult to create the perfect system for a mass market audience.”

How to establish JTBDs for retail banking customers

JTBD is a great exercise for cross-functional teams to gain a better understanding of their customers. There are four key steps:

Let’s break each of these down in more detail.

Discover the primary job

The first and most important step is to identify JTBDs in the first place. The best way to get started is by speaking with actual customers—what specifically are they trying to accomplish? This typically involves formal customer interviews.

Ryan recommends you avoid asking about product experiences, like “How satisfied are you with your bank?” or “How can your bank improve?” Customers often don’t know what they want or struggle to describe their needs in the context of financial products and services. Instead, he suggests questions like:

• How do you manage your money across any given month?

• What big purchases have you got coming up?

• How do you intend to finance that?

• If I could be your financial assistant, what would you have me do?

Elaborate with related and emotional jobs

Most jobs to be done have multiple layers. It’s important to flesh these out in their entirely to effectively capture and contextualize the goals your customers are trying to achieve:

• The core job: The main job the customer wants to get done, such as transferring money from one account to another

• Related jobs: Jobs that the customer wants to get done related to the core job, such as finding the best account for transferring

• Emotional jobs: How the core job is supposed to address the customer’s emotions as they get it done

The latter is an especially important category to consider, since personal finance is an incredibly personal and emotional topic for customers.

Align with your products

Job statements give your team the ability to plug in product and service offerings to directly address specific goals. For example: “Efficiently manage and track multiple savings goals”. This JTBD is practically begging for Ally Bank’s savings buckets, which enables customers to organize savings in themed buckets, all from a single account. Or, as Ally describes it:

"Think of buckets as digital envelopes—they allow you to divvy up your savings into different categories … without the need for multiple bank accounts or complicated math. You can create up to 30 savings buckets within one account, each dedicated to a different goal, like a vacation to Hawaii, a rainy-day fund, or a kitchen renovation. These buckets help contextualize your savings, which can help motivate you to save more. It’s one thing to see a big lump sum of money in your account, and another thing entirely to see exactly how much you’ve saved (and how far you have to go)... We want to help you visualize your goals—so you can get there faster.”

Integrate with your customer journey maps

JTBDs can provide more context to customer journey maps, which outline every touchpoint customers have with your brand. "We've applied the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework to go beyond surface-level product features, focusing instead on the broader financial outcomes our customers seek," says Gareth Boyd, Head of Growth at Credit Card Compare. "This insight drives us to offer more than comparisons; we provide comprehensive financial guidance, from analyzing credit scores to credit card reward maximization."

Beyond enabling more personalized and relevant offerings, JTBDs can also help boost customer satisfaction and retention. At TeleDirect, a call center service for finance businesses, the team uses this framework to tackle common issues.

“[S]upporting a customer's need is important, but understanding the why behind each ask is where you'll truly craft an elite customer experience,” says CEO Smitha Baliga. “We take time to identify the ‘Why?’ of each customer's issue, so our solutions are tailored to their respective needs. We aim to incorporate these JTBD principles to craft a customer journey that is responsive, personalized and grounded in fulfilling the needs of our customers.”

Next steps

You can’t fortify an entire bunker overnight. But you can take meaningful steps to adjust to your surroundings, earn new accounts, boost feature adoption and hang onto deposits—even if other product lines haven't caught up. You don't need an elaborate scheme that takes forever to plan and implement either. Make little improvements, one at a time, until your team is just as agile, innovative and customer-centric as any startup.

What now? A few ideas...

Arm yourself with additional resources

Here are a handful think you may find especially useful:

• 7-step framework for customer journey mapping in banking
• Improvement checklist for digital account opening journeys
• 5 proven customer retention strategies for banks
• Massive Agile guide on product analytics upgrades to make your customers stick

Recruit allies

Send the Apocalypse survival guide to your counterpart on another team who may be open to collaborating. Suggested DM:

“Hey Portia, so I just stumbled on this FinTech Apocalypse survival guide for retail banking teams. It had some interesting ideas on sharing customer insights across product lines. Thoughts on trying out some of these next quarter?

Then drop this link.

Tell your boss

“Hey Harold, I found this guide on agile practices for retail banking teams and thought there were some interesting takeaways that could help our team improve collaboration with Portia's portfolio. Just thought I'd send your way, in case you wanted to take a look!"

Take a self-guided product tour

Customers are trying to sign up a digital account at the fictional Glassbank, but they're encountering a serious source of friction in the process. Can you spot what it is? Poke around in the self-guided Glassbox tour to find out!

Let us know your thoughts on this thing

Editor’s note: If you’ve tried out any of the tips from the guide, want to contribute to the next update or have general feedback, I’d love to hear from you! Email [email protected] or hit me up on LinkedIn. Thanks for reading! -Rachel