As a startup challenger bank to Canada’s Big Five Banks, Neo Financial faces the formidable task of gaining market share. A partnership with the country's oldest department store to offer customers the Hudson's Bay Reward credit card presented a prime opportunity to gain vital exposure and onboard two million potential customers. A key migration strategy involved onboarding Hudson's Bay cardholders at store checkouts via multi-device platforms that facilitated seamless onboarding for customers and store attendants.
Onboarding millions of customers was a monumental task that required addressing numerous use cases and scenarios. To account for the various actors involved in the onboarding process, extensive research and analysis of existing systems, as well as customer and store associate behaviours, were conducted over several tens of hours.
The app's design needed to enable quick transitions between store associates and customers to meet the distinct needs necessary for successful onboarding. Optimizing the information architecture was essential for facilitating new customer onboarding to obtain credit cards. By focusing on this aspect, I was able to effectively accommodate the flows for potential customers seeking to acquire a credit card.
Stakeholder feedback from interviews was crucial in designing the experience to help HBC customers claim and reconcile reward points, as well as set up new accounts for new customers. I was intentional about making sure existing customers know that the system recongnized them even though it was new and probably foreign to them.
Today, millions of Canadians use Neo Financial-powered Hudson's Bay cards for their daily transactions. While there are now numerous onboarding methods available, the store onboarding platform was crucial to the rapid large-scale adoption strategy at the beginning of the partnership between Neo Financial and Hudson's Bay Company.