Multinational Fortune 100 Payments Organization
A global credit card market leader with 150+ years of experience driving customer loyalty and innovation in financial services sought out strategic growth opportunities through category expansion. Our client enlisted Ippon to identify growth drivers, recommend new product launches, and develop a digital product roadmap it could implement. Using design thinking methodology and a “customer-first” mindset to drive our product discovery initiative, we proposed 13 innovative product concepts that empower the client to acquire, engage, and retain a cross-generational customer base while driving growth for its business.
Key Figures
“The reason we wanted to partner with Ippon is because you guys are self-driving; we set the structure, but you're self-driving and that’s why we have people like you. I love the material."
The Challenge: Identifying product growth opportunities in an increasingly saturated market.
As a market leader with 150+ years of experience driving customer loyalty and innovation in financial services, our client sought out strategic growth opportunities through category expansion. With market dynamics such as the prevalence of mobile banking, unbundling of banking services, and increasing competition from challenger banks, our client recognized the need to address a key question: What should we build to differentiate our products, drive growth for the company, and serve our customers?
Our Approach: Product discovery focused on customer needs, as well as market and organizational context.
We honed in on three aspects that drove research and ideation efforts throughout the course of our discovery project:
- Customer needs, expectations, and evolving behaviors
- The competitive landscape and our client’s unique positioning
- Our client’s organizational structure, growth strategy, and customer base
We started with customer and market research. A concrete understanding of problems customers face and how they solve those problems today allowed us to empathize with the needs of our end users. Next, an in-depth analysis of the market landscape pinpointed not only the breadth of choice customers already have today, but also the white space in which we saw a net new market opportunity for our client. Finally, evaluating our clients’ unique organizational assets, from technology to brand equity, helped us to realize unique points of differentiation that would enable us to create incremental value.
We wove this together to create a comprehensive product roadmap, which proposed an iterative approach to new product development for our client’s consumer and commercial customer segments.
Drawing inspiration from a number of traditional innovation frameworks, we ultimately customized our product development roadmap to our client’s implementation abilities. We built a roadmap that ensured delivery teams could efficiently execute the core, foundational capabilities while experimenting with nascent, and potentially more disruptive ideas.
The Outcome: A roadmap of integrated services that deliver customer value and growth.
Looking at the intersection of customer needs, the market landscape and internal organizational attributes, we ideated 13 new products and features to help our client’s current and future customers simplify, manage, and enhance their financial lives. Emphasizing service-driven capabilities elevated our client’s product roadmap and encouraged a focus beyond the more common table-stakes capabilities.
With our technology partners, we conducted a feasibility analysis on a subset of those 13 new ideas to determine a strategy for when to build new ideas versus when to partner with an existing provider. As a result, we proposed partnerships with Fintechs that could help our client further accelerate its delivery of three future roadmap items. By delivering a comprehensive product roadmap one month ahead of schedule, we armed our client’s Product and Technology groups with innovative concepts that would drive value for its customers and growth for the organization.
If your organization is asking itself, “What should we build?” Ippon can help your teams discover innovative product opportunities that create market value.
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