Fueling Digital Banking Sales with a Mobile Product Shopping Experience

This initiative was not on the roadmap. It was not part of the quarterly plan, and no one had asked me to work on it. I chose to pursue it because the signal was too strong to ignore. Reading the prior year's annual report alongside the published company-level goals for the coming year, I noticed a consistent theme: executive leadership was publicly committed to growing digital sales, deepening product penetration per household, and reducing the cost of acquiring new relationships. The mobile app was the most heavily trafficked digital surface the bank owned, and it was doing none of those things.

I conducted a round of light secondary market research to pressure-test the hypothesis before committing any team resources. The research confirmed what the annual report implied. Competitors were rapidly rolling out native in-app shopping experiences, customers were increasingly expecting to complete financial purchases in the channel they already lived in, and the gap between servicing and sales inside banking apps was closing quickly across the industry.

With that ammunition, I built a concise business case that tied the opportunity directly to the executive goals already committed to in the annual report. I then scheduled time with the Senior Product Manager who owned the mobile banking channel and walked him through the reasoning. The goal of the conversation was to demonstrate that the work I wanted to pursue would accelerate existing channel commitments rather than compete with them. We aligned on a path forward, and I walked out of that meeting with approval to invest in a deeper round of secondary market research and a formal competitive analysis.

With approval secured, I resisted the urge to jump straight into pulling sources. Research that is not framed in advance tends to drift, and findings that arrive without a clear question attached are easy for stakeholders to dismiss. Before opening a single tab, I documented the framing of the work so that every finding could be traced back to a specific question and every recommendation could be audited against a stated hypothesis.

The framing covered the entire UX research effort, not just the secondary market pass. It set the goals, the hypotheses I was committing to test, and the two-part plan that the research would execute in sequence. Risk, compliance, product, and channel partners could read this single page and understand exactly what I was setting out to learn and why.

The first half of the plan was a structured secondary market research pass. I relied on advanced Google operators to surface white papers, analyst reports, published research from consulting firms, and peer-reviewed studies from academic and industry sources. The goal was to build a defensible evidence base that any stakeholder, regardless of function, could read and reach the same conclusion I had.

Each finding was captured alongside its source so that the final deliverable could be audited by risk, compliance, or executive reviewers without additional work. The findings clustered into three insight themes, which I have organized below in the same shape they took inside the original research report.

Running in parallel with the secondary research, I conducted a structured competitive analysis of peer and challenger banks. I audited each competitor's mobile app end to end, documenting how they surfaced new product opportunities, how they handled pre-qualification, how they moved customers from discovery to funded account, and where they placed the experience inside their broader information architecture.

Two findings mattered most. First, there was a clear set of trends that nearly every competitor had adopted. These were the table-stakes patterns that our target customers would already be familiar with and would therefore expect to see when we shipped our experience. Second, a smaller group of competitors had begun experimenting with genuine differentiators, including personalized offer surfacing, integrated pre-approval, and cross-channel handoff with the branch network. Identifying that delta gave me the raw material I needed to shape a vision that was both credible to stakeholders and ambitious enough to be worth funding.

With both halves of the research plan complete, I synthesized the findings into a single learnings and recommendations deliverable. The goal was to give product, engineering, and channel leadership a document they could act on without re-reading the entire research base. The synthesis split into three parts: what we learned, the short term moves we should make in the first release, and the longer term plays we should sequence into the roadmap once that first release was live.

With the evidence base in place, I authored a four-phase product vision that gave leadership a way to invest incrementally without losing sight of the long-term destination. The phases were intentionally sequenced so that each one delivered standalone value while laying the foundation for the next, starting with a native catalog inside the authenticated mobile app and ending with full continuity across mobile, web, branch, and contact center.

Before designing anything new, I mapped the experience a customer currently moved through when trying to learn about or apply for a new Santander product from inside the mobile app. The flow was long, fragmented, and entirely user-driven. There was no product shopping surface inside the authenticated app, no entry point on the account overview, and no system-initiated prompt anywhere in the journey. The customer had to think to want a new product, leave the app on their own, open a browser, navigate to santanderbank.com, and start over from scratch.

The yellow dots on the diagram below mark every point of friction in that journey. BJ Fogg's behavior model frames the problem exactly: a desired behavior only happens when motivation, ability, and a prompt converge at the same moment. Motivation was already there for a meaningful slice of our customer base, but ability was the pain point. The mobile app offered no native prompt to explore products or open a new account, so any customer who wanted to act was forced to leave the app, find the public site on their own, and restart the process from scratch. Every one of those steps stripped away ability, and the flow guaranteed that most customers would never get past the first friction point.

Capturing that state in a single diagram made the cost of inaction obvious. Stakeholders who had lived inside individual steps of the flow had rarely seen the entire journey laid out in one place, and the act of visualizing it, friction points and all, was itself an alignment tool.

Once the current state was documented, I designed the desired state user flow. The friction points were removed by giving the mobile app a real product shopping surface, by injecting a system-initiated trigger at the moments customers were most likely to act, and by carrying the customer through to a funded account without forcing them to leave the app or restart the journey in a browser.

The desired state covered two distinct entry conditions, each with its own flow. The first served unauthenticated visitors who could be moved into an account opening directly from the login screen. The second served authenticated customers who were already inside the app and could express intent to open a new account. For the authenticated path, we used the live session to prefill the digital sales application inside an embedded WebView, so the customer was never asked for information the bank already had.

A product vision without measurement is a wish list. I defined the KPIs and success measures that the team would use to evaluate the experience after launch, then walked them through a working session with the Senior Product Manager who owned the mobile banking channel. The purpose of that session was not to get approval on the metrics. It was to confirm that we were tracking the same things his leadership chain already cared about, so that the numbers we reported would land inside the reporting structure the channel used every month.

We aligned on a mix of engagement metrics tied to discovery, conversion metrics tied to origination, and downstream revenue metrics tied to funded account value. That alignment was the single most important meeting of the project. It meant that when the feature shipped, the team had a pre-agreed scoreboard to report against and no one would be able to move the goalposts after the fact.

Locking these measures in before a single line of production code was written also gave engineering a concrete analytics contract to build against. Tracking events, property schemas, and funnel instrumentation were scoped alongside the feature work rather than retrofitted afterward, which is how most teams end up with measurement gaps on the metrics they care about most. By the time each surface reached code review, the analytics tied to every key result were already in place, validated in a lower environment, and ready to report against on day one of launch.

With the desired state flow locked, I translated each step into low-fidelity wireframes. Working at this level of fidelity let me validate layout, hierarchy, and navigation choices quickly with engineering and product partners before investing in visual design. The wireframes covered the full journey, from the moment a customer first encountered a product inside the app to the confirmation screen on a completed application.

Once the wireframes were stable, I moved into high-fidelity design. The visual layer respected the existing Santander mobile design system while introducing a small set of new patterns for product discovery, comparison, and application entry. Every screen was built to be production-ready so engineering could begin estimating effort against real artifacts rather than approximations.

I ran a round of moderated usability testing against the high-fidelity designs. Participants were asked to complete the core tasks the experience was built to support, including finding a product, comparing options, and starting an application. The sessions validated that the direction was sound. Customers understood the entry points, moved through the flow without assistance, and consistently arrived at the outcomes the team had designed for.

The test surfaced a small set of refinements rather than any fundamental rework. That was the outcome I wanted. It told me that the upstream research, the phased vision, and the alignment on KPIs had done their job, because the design that came out of that foundation held up under contact with real users.

After usability testing validated the core direction, I produced a set of additional high-fidelity variations and an expanded exploration of the experience. These were not alternatives to the validated design. They were forward-looking artifacts intended to give stakeholders a shared visual north star for what the later phases of the vision could look like once the initial release was live.

Having that shared picture kept alignment tight across product, engineering, marketing, and the branch network. Every team could see where the work was going, and conversations about scope and sequencing became easier because everyone was pointing at the same artifact when they talked about the future.