Mercedes-Benz Bank Banking App – Mobility Bank Ecosystem

Background

Banking is becoming more and more digitalized. It is an irresistible trend. But the bank itself is still a quite traditional area. As a Mercedes-Benz branded bank, it is a tough task to fulfill our future customers’ needs and at the same time also match the company’s strategic goal – as a mobility provider. In order to reach this goal, a potential hypothesis came up – “a mobility bank”.

Pre-Workshop

Although there was an initial direction, how to move to this direction was still not clear. In this case, a pre-workshop was hold to brainstorm as many as possible ideas, in order to make the direction more tangible. After the workshop, we realized one single product cannot really move us to the direction we want. An ecosystem was strongly required if we want to achieve our goal in the end.

Research

There were a lot of banking and payment providers in the market. We did market research focusing on possible direct and indirect competitors.

Design Thinking Workshop

By using Design Thinking as the backbone, a workshop was organized with diverse participants. During the workshop, a potential new customer journey was defined involving the enhanced current products and several possible new touchpoints. A new ecosystem was initially built-up to offer the customer a full-scale seamless experience.

Design the initial touchpoint

For the first step to build such an ecosystem, the banking app was determined as the main touchpoint. Before starting on a prototype, we iterated on the concept sketches. To have a proof of the concept, an interactive prototype with the high-fidelity visual design was created and prepared for the concept testing.

Concept Testing

The testing was held in the Mercedes-Benz museum. Besides the invited current customers, we also tested with the visitors in the museum. These people were also our potential customers. At the end of the day, in total 21 tests were interviewed, with almost 50/50 gender across different age groups. The findings were mainly focused on the banking app but also covered most products of the ecosystem.