Human insights for future financial services.
Bankinter Lab / Fintech / Service Design
As my first project as Head of Service Design in Bankinter’s Innovation department, we conducted in-depth research with stakeholders and users. Our goal was to identify key behavioural archetypes, design tailored services for each, and align the bank’s departments involved in their development.
The problem —
Rethinking Banking to design services that truly matter.
To create better banking experiences, we need to move beyond traditional segmentation and focus on how people interact with their money. Understanding their behaviours, challenges, and expectations allows us to design meaningful, user-centred services that add real value.
At the same time, we must bridge the gap between what banks offer and what customers seek, ensuring that our services are accessible, relevant, and engaging. We approach this transformation by seeking to answer four key questions:
Who Are They? — Traditional segmentation strategies fall short—age, gender, and income alone don’t reveal how people make financial decisions. To design meaningful services, we must focus on behaviour and what truly matters to users when managing their money.
What Do They Need? — Beyond identifying who they are, we need to understand their financial challenges and daily money management habits. By mapping their day-to-day interactions, we can pinpoint the key moments where banking services can add real value.
What Do We Offer Them? — Traditional banking and modern consumer expectations are misaligned. Banks focus on products and economic value, while customers care about experience and personal value. To bridge this gap, we must align business goals with user needs, creating human-centred services that go beyond price and drive loyalty and long-term engagement.
How Do We Reach Them? — Great services mean nothing if customers don’t know about them or can’t access them easily. Strengthening our brand identity and values, while implementing an omnichannel strategy, ensures that we connect with the right users at the right time, through the right channels.
Research —
What are those in charge saying?
We interviewed various stakeholders in different positions in the bank, from the IT director or the Marketing director to heavyweights in the main business lines.
Among the main learnings, we discovered a single, common goal: to capture users profitably in the short and medium-term.
We identified 3 main problems:
Obsolete digital product.
We are not attracting younger profiles and our attraction models are not working.
External threats are multiplying: Fintech, NeoBanks, Open Banking,...
And we face 3 key challenges:
Offer a differential and specialised value proposition for a specific type of customer, not for all.
Innovate in banking products by involving the business units.
Positioning the Bankinter brand to impact the public we want to target.
33% of millennials think they won't need a bank in ten years.
Who is really in charge?
We conducted over 30 one-on-one interviews with three distinct user groups to identify common patterns, key behavioural differences, and points of discourse saturation.
Customers: to optimise our services based on their specific needs.
Prospects: to understand their key life moments and financial needs.
Non-traditional banking users: to identify emerging trends for the bank.
Main Insights —
The concept of the invisible bank.
We conducted this research during a period of widespread distrust in banks, which undoubtedly influenced our findings. However, the core conclusion was clear:
"I don’t want to be bothered by the bank, and I don’t want any unpleasant surprises. I just want my money to be safe, and if they offer me something, it should be personalized and genuinely relevant to me."
People expect their bank to always be there, but discreetly and reliably: a silent guardian of their finances, stepping in only when it truly adds value and helps them make the most of their money.
we identified key trends shaping user behavior, including a growing interest in financial alternatives beyond traditional banking and a desire for greater autonomy in managing money.
We also uncovered three distinct phases in a user’s financial journey, closely tied to their life stage and relationship with banks:
Phase 1: Money as Fruit. At this stage, money is seen as the result of work—a means for enjoyment or survival. Users focus on earning and spending, with minimal engagement in complex financial products.
Phase 2: Money as a Seed. As incomes grow, users start recognising money’s potential to generate more money. This phase marks the transition into savings, investments, and more sophisticated banking products.
Phase 3: Money as Fertiliser. Here, money is seen as a multiplier—a tool to accelerate financial growth. Users seek premium services and strategic investments, leveraging wealth to maximise returns efficiently.
Understanding these evolving mindsets helps us align banking services with users’ real needs at each stage of their financial journey.
Archetypes —
Mapping attitudes and behaviours.
Building on our insights into money perception, banking engagement, and user autonomy, we identified six archetypes that represent distinct financial attitudes and behaviours. These archetypes help us better understand user needs and design services that align with their financial mindset and decision-making approach.
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Generation K
This profile defines success as being free and unique, authentic, and "made their own way". They seek to achieve professional success without betraying deeply held values such as justice, equality, or an ethical and sustainable world.
Oriented to: Enjoying the moment with their friends while squeezing the most out of the little money they may have.
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Commodity Experiencer
This profile defines success by enjoying the present. They seek delight in choosing how to spend their money and are optimistic about the future.
Oriented to: enjoy their money and their freedom to make the hard work and effort to prosper worthwhile.
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Commodity Balancer
This profile goes to great lengths to keep their financial life in balance. Balancers define success as getting the best deal on every transaction, maximizing rewards, and sticking to their financial plan while avoiding worries.
Oriented to: building a safety net and saving enough to avoid the anxiety of short-term unforeseen events.
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Networker
This is an ambitious profile, he defines success as achieving goals little by little until he gets to where he wants to be. They have a clear and tangible career plan that helps them feel prepared for the future and have everything under control.
Oriented to: progress and fulfill his objectives, make the most of the current infrastructures by hacking them as he wants.
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Comfort Lover
This profile defines success as enjoying all that he has achieved in a familiar and trusting environment. He feels that professionally and personally he has done it all, and now he everything and now all that's left is to enjoy.
Oriented to: your well-being and that of your family. Maintaining your social position and that everything is under control.
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Old Gamer
These people define success as saving money and increasing their wealth so that they can be happy and live comfortably.
Oriented to: being in control of their life and money. They seek to support and resources, not instructions and rules.
The Value Proposition —
Translating behaviours into opportunity areas.
Applying new methods of understanding and segmenting customers gives us a competitive advantage, enabling us to design valuable services that genuinely improve people’s financial lives.
By analysing financial behaviours and user personalities, we identified common needs and translated them into four key opportunity areas. Through ideation sessions with Bankinter experts and different user profiles, we explored 4 territories in depth:
Investment Territory: Investment emerged as one of the most discussed topics, particularly among younger users seeking an accessible entry point into the world of investing. Many feel that too much financial knowledge is required, making it an intimidating space. More sophisticated users, on the other hand, expect proactive support from their bank based on their financial expertise.
Housing Territory: Housing is a major life event that affects all user archetypes. The financial impact is significant, and users face high uncertainty in making decisions. We found that banks primarily focus on mortgages, with little guidance provided for the decision-making process. Additionally, there is a gap in services related to renting, despite it being a key step before homeownership and an increasingly common trend.
Shared Expenses Territory: Managing shared expenses—whether with a partner, roommates, or groups—was frequently cited as an unmet need. We explored this from two perspectives: Ongoing shared expenses (e.g., monthly household bills, subscriptions) and one-time shared expenses (e.g., trips, group gifts).
Financial Coaching Territory: Users expressed a need for support in financial planning, including Saving strategies, day-to-day money management and achieving financial goals.
By addressing these opportunity areas, we aim to bridge the gap between user expectations and traditional banking offerings, creating services that truly make a difference.
From opportunities and ideas to prototypes for testing.
After defining our four opportunity territories, we conducted co-creation sessions focused on each one. These workshops generated over 50 ideas, which we then filtered based on impact and effort, incorporating direct user feedback throughout the process.
From this selection, we identified 7 standout concepts:
Moves: Bringing investment closer to the betting world, making it more engaging for younger audiences.
Rocket: A communication and investment platform designed for group investors.
Homeet: Supporting users through all key moments related to housing decisions.
Merger: Virtual accounts that help limit and share common expenses seamlessly.
Become: A financial tool that helps users project their future based on their economic reality.
Jiffy: A financing tool that encourages habitual saving.
Goers: Pay-as-you-go financial services, allowing users to contract services as needed.
To bring these ideas to life, we created low-fidelity prototypes and presented them to stakeholders. Among them, Homeet received the highest ratings and was chosen for further development.
We then refined Homeet in greater detail, preparing a small commercial presentation and high-fidelity prototypes for another focus group round. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive (you can see the full case here).
Finally, the Homeet concept was integrated into Bankinter’s business strategy, becoming a key part of their value proposition for young customers—a testament to the power of user-centred design and co-creation.
Lessons Learned —
The Human Banking concept is here to stay.
It is fascinating to discover how many of the services we designed remained relevant. Throughout the process, we learned a great deal, but our most valuable insight was that we had gained a deep understanding of people’s banking needs. That experience laid the foundation for a human-centred approach to product design—a principle that stayed with me and proved essential throughout my years in the banking industry.
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