Understanding the Decision Making Journey

Challenge

Helping a leading financial service provider understand how people choose their ‘everyday’ bank.

Banking is a constantly evolving industry, with more choices now than ever before. Yet it remains an incredibly important decision as the bank people choose can become their bank for life! Our client wanted to understand how people choose their ‘everyday’ bank, going beyond the surface level motivations of ‘convenience’ and ‘incentives’, to identify the meaningful points in their decision-making journey, and how they as a brand could activate against them.

Approach

We began by facilitating a series of digital diaries with young couples, new students, and expats in the greater Toronto Area to better understand how people felt about their everyday bank, exploring their attitudes and behaviors surrounding everyday activities such as deposits, withdrawals and mobile banking. We then went one level deeper via in-person interviews, where we examined how those feelings manifested in the banking journey and where the most important steps in the process were to provide our client with maps that illuminated the ‘moments that matter’ as people consider switching.

Impact

Our work helped our client go beyond motivations of pure convenience and incentives to identify the crucial points in the decision-making journey where they could truly impact switching decisions. We also provided guidelines and guardrails around developing marketing strategies to drive customer acquisition and growth as they looked towards becoming the go-to ‘everyday’ bank.