Leveraging credit card business through a seamless onboarding for a leading Caribbean bank.
A leading bank in the Dominican Republic wanted the best digital card-onboarding experience in its market: fast to convert, and built to keep customers engaged long after. I led the redesign end to end, from a three-day diagnosis workshop to the governance handover, over 28 weeks.
The challenge
Rework a regulated, technical onboarding from end to end, unify two separate flows (credit and debit) into one, and do it without direct control over the build, which sat with the bank's own delivery squads. The work ran as a strategy-and-design core coordinating those squads, so influence had to come from clarity, not authority.
The approach
Six phases, from diagnosis to governance handover. A three-day on-site workshop, current-state journeys for credit and debit, nine personas on an income-by-digitalization model, around 78 pain points grouped into six themes, and a heuristic audit set the baseline. A north-star metric, a unified to-be journey on eight hypotheses, a prototype, and user validation turned it into a plan the bank could build.
The outcome
The bank left with a to-be onboarding validated with 18 real users and judged viable in practice, a metrics system to steer it, a prioritized development plan, and the documentation to build and run it internally. Two ideas tested especially well: knowing you are pre-approved before downloading the app, and an instant digital card to trigger first use.
What was delivered
- Current-state journeys and six pain-point clusters
- Nine customer personas (income by digitalization)
- Heuristic usability audit and market benchmark
- North-star metric and MVP analytics dashboard
- Unified to-be journey with eight validated hypotheses
- Prototype tested with 18 users, fit-gap, and roadmap
- Governance handover documentation
Client anonymized under confidentiality.