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Business background
Jenius Bank is a full-service digital bank offering personal loans, high-yield savings, and integrated financial-wellness tools. As SMBC’s strategic entry point into global retail banking, the company is tasked with building a modern, scalable consumer platform inside a highly regulated enterprise. To support that ambition, Jenius invests heavily in in-house product, engineering, and design teams to deliver the next generation of digital banking experiences.
Role highlights
Mission: A customer's entire financial picture in one location
Mission: A customer's entire financial picture in one location
The bank was founded on the idea of helping customers live richer lives. The digital product and design team was focused on integrating personal financial tools and experiences allowing customers to view and manage their entire financial picture in one location. Powered through vendors like MX, Jenius Bank implemented external account aggregation, contextual insights, and next best actions for all accounts. This business model of providing customers views into all of their financial accounts supported a sticky customer base who are less rate sensitive and less likely to “rate hop”.
Mission: A customer's entire financial picture in one location
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Deployed 3 native mobile applications, 1 responsive web application, 1 marketing brand playbook, and a marketing storefront website to power 250,000 active customers.
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Achieved a 4.8/5 star customer effort score for UX payment & money movement flows within all digital journeys.
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Enabled digital customer journeys to facilitate over 50k transfers, 35k payments, 7k check-deposits, and 2k insights successfully.
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Powered digital features and UX journeys for customers supporting growth in over 2B in deposits and 2B in personal loans balance within 3 years.
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Enabled digital customer journeys to facilitate over 50k transfers, 35k payments, 7k check-deposits, and 2k insights successfully.
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Powered digital features and UX journeys for customers supporting growth in over 2B in deposits and 2B in personal loans balance within 3 years.
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Founded and built a multi-disciplined design team of 7 covering expertise in native mobile iOS/ Android, responsive web, systems, visual brand, movement, WCAG 2.1 AAA accessibility, and multi-media design.
Role highlights
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Founded and built a multi-disciplined design team of 7 covering expertise in native mobile iOS/ Android, responsive web, systems, visual brand, movement, WCAG 2.1 AAA accessibility, and multi-media design.
Role highlights
Ethos and framework
Ethos: Meeting customers
where they are
Ethos: Meeting customers where they are
Our ethos of “meeting users where they are” is an obvious yet complex problem to solve. Most financial institutions build siloed financial wellness tools that are stand-alone solutions, often burried in their apps. Our goal was to shed the barriers and leverage insight APIs to build native PFM experiences and embed them into everyday banking actions and customer journeys.
UX ethos and framework
Framework: Dashboard widget centric
Our ethos of “meeting users where they are” is an obvious yet complex problem to solve. Most financial institutions build siloed financial wellness tools that are stand-alone solutions, often burried in their apps. Our goal was to shed the barriers and leverage insight APIs to build native PFM experiences and embed them into everyday banking actions and customer journeys.
Ethos: Meeting customers where they are
Framework: Dashboard widget centric
A modular, widget-centric framework turns the channel into a composable system where teams ship capabilities instead of pages, increasing speed, ownership, and resilience. It enables true personalization by allowing experiences to dynamically reconfigure around each customer’s needs, rather than forcing everyone through the same static screens. The result is a scalable financial control center that is personalized to every customer.
Framework: Dashboard widget centric
A bank made for modern living and devices
JB mobile app
The Jenius Bank mobile application is a fully native application built from the ground up by the in-house digital team. Similar to the web application, it offers full service banking and personal financial features. 2 mobile apps were designed and built to meet the digital expectations from customers in supporting both iOS and Android platforms. These apps were built completely native to their platforms requiring expertise in Apple’s “Swift UI” and Google’s “Material” design standards. With over 30,000 active users, the mobile apps support customers in giving them the freedom to engage with Jenius Bank in whichever digital channel they prefer.
JB mobile app
A bank made for modern living and devices
JB web app
The Jenius Bank web application is a fully responsive browser app built from the ground up by the in-house digital team. It provides customers a web-based full servicing platform to perform daily banking tasks. After a rocky and unreliable 1 year contract with an external vendor, the business pivoted to building our web application internally which was the critical first step in owning our own digital destiny. After 1 year of build, it was deployed to over 250,000 users with great success.
JB web app
Jeniusbank.com storefront maketing website
Focused on conversion, Jeniusbank.com is built on a headless CMS where marketing authors can deploy content rapidly and funnel customers and prospects into learning about the bank and be a direct path for customers to open accounts. It also acted as the "front door" to the authenticated space.
Jeniusbank.com storefront marketing website
Creative brand building
Creating a brand from scratch takes a village. In collaboration between marketing, design, and product teams, the Jenius Bank brand strategy focuses on customer personas developed for its target demographic of the “HENRY’ (High-Earner-Not-Rich-Yet). This younger, tech savvy customer paved the way for the look and feel of our visual brand. We focused on digital first, playful and approachable aesthetics while still maintaining a brand that reads premium and trustworthy.
Creative brand building
A lean but mighty team
The Jenius Bank design team was built 1 by 1 over 2 years as our digital offerings expanded into new channels requiring dedicated design support. Built on discipline, the team was segmented to support 3 work streams: mobile, web, and marketing design. Each of these 3 work streams were supported by a lead designer and a support designer. Additionally, the design team owned standards and implementation of WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility requirements which called for the addition of an ADA specialist to float over all work streams to ensure proper implementation of ADA guidelines.
A lean but mighty team
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