- Jon Trygve Utne, Naomi Thayalan and Martin Franing
DNB has had online banks for retail and corporate customers for approximately 25 years. Our main site, www.dnb.no, has 10 million visits per month, and the retail online bank has 1,1 million unique visitors. Our customers have a very high degree of self service, and they give the channels high scores on satisfaction metrics. So, why change something that is currently working well for the customers?
The answer is complex and has several dimensions, but put simply: just because a customer is satisfied with something today, does not mean they will be satisfied tomorrow. We know that the customers are expecting a lot from us. The customers expect companies to know who they are, what they like, what products they have in their portfolio, what their future needs are and to be a guiding hand through difficult but important matters related to their financial needs. To be relevant tomorrow, we need to up our game and create not just sufficient, but great customer experiences. Based on this, we set a vision and high ambitions with our new channels. These ambitions were anchored across the Group.
From application-based to exploring opportunities within content and personalization
When creating something new, from scratch, we can think bigger and build a foundation and platform to enhance flexibility. From a technical perspective, following up on our tech strategy and the success we have had with mobile native apps in cloud, we decided to create a new online bank in cloud. The different business areas within DNB are now creating modernized and cloud native applications that will be deployed to and run on this group-wide web platform.
One immediate benefit from this work is that we will finally have a consistent UX across web and mobile, and the UX will be much more accessible, following guidelines from WCAG etc. The new online bank will of course also be responsive and secure. Ultimately, however, the goal for the new online bank is to enable more advanced features that will be rolled out in the years to come.
Since the inception of our online bank many years ago, the full customer experience has been the sum of different applications (which enable you to interact with your data, e.g. your account list or a mortgage calculator) and content (which can be all kinds of rich text, images and videos that serves the purpose of explaining our product portfolio, giving advice, supporting customer journeys etc.). An important goal of the new online bank is to enable more personalization of both content and data to target your specific needs better. This is important to give our retail users a better experience, but it is maybe even more important to our corporate users, since DNB covers everything from one-man shops to large corporations. The latter even covers many different roles within a company that uses different aspects of our services. It should be obvious that all these kinds of users may have many different needs, and consequently, we need our UX to adapt to these needs to make our users as efficient as possible.
In addition, we want to make our different channels work better together to support different customer journeys (e.g. applying for a mortgage) across devices. To achieve this, we need to orchestrate different kinds of state across our channels. Our chatbot Aino will gradually improve at supporting you in the channel that you’re in at any point in time, and the Pengebruk feature, that our users already know from the mobile app, will become more advanced over time.
Technical overview
Central to the new online bank is the concept of composable frontends, these days popularly referred to as microfrontends. When a page request comes in, the web platform will compute which user experience the user should get in that moment, and then different page fragments representing both static and personalized content as well as dynamic and data-intensive applications, will be stitched together and returned to the user.
The fully responsive UI elements are all made in React and based on our design system, Eufemia, and they will fetch data from a large number of Backend-For-Frontend (BFF) APIs, written mostly in Kotlin and Java. The backends for the web platform and the supporting APIs are all running out of AWS through a mix of fully serverless and container-based services. We have CI/CD pipelines supporting the SDLC from Git all the way to production, supporting patterns like ephemeral preview environments.
The work ahead
Channel developers in DNB work in BizDevOps teams, where each team is responsible for certain functional domains, e,g, Payments or Accounts. These teams are cross-functional, meaning that web, mobile and backend developers are working together and have a holistic ownership of the domain capabilities across channels. As already mentioned, these teams are currently working on different features that will eventually be rolled out in the new online bank. The current online banks have been developed over many years and contain a lot of functionality. Hence it will take some time before the new online bank is close to feature complete.
But on a positive note, some basic functions are already in a very promising state. All DNB employees as well as a selected number of customers already have access to the new retail experience, and a selected number of corporate users already have access to the new corporate experience, so those are significant milestones for us. The main purpose of going live to a small number of users now, is to collect feedback and measure whether the new designs and flows work as intended. This learning process will then inform the ongoing work with the pending business functions before we roll out to more users.