From 48h to 30m - Accelerate business account onboarding
MSB bank, founded in 1991, is Vietnam’s first joint-stock commercial bank and one of the country’s top ten lenders. Today it serves over 3.1 million retail and 64,300 corporate customers through a network of 274 branches, transaction offices and 300 ATMs nationwide.
The MOA (Main-Operating-Account) project was launched to rethink MSB’s corporate account strategy. Its goal: increase Total Operating Income (TOI) by growing the number of business clients and making MSB the primary banking partner for SMEs.
Business capability analysis revealed that, compared to other initiatives, the account-opening process offers a high-impact opportunity with relatively minimal effort. From the insight, we aim to revamp MSB’s business account-opening journey—streamlining compliance, sharpening our competitive edge, and boosting digital self-service.
Over five months, I acted as the strategic designer: I defined the plan, led customer research, crafted the service design, and coordinated stakeholders. I delivered a fully digital flow that:
At project kick-off, I evaluated existing account-opening performance by reviewing existing business and operation reports, identified critical issues and reframed the problem into 4 key areas (as shown below)
To truely understand the underlying reasons, I mapped the current account opening process & customer journey and combined them into a service blueprint, allowing me and the team to have a bird-eye view of the system and to pinpoint areas of improvement.
Although our scope covered all corporate segments, I chose to focus on SMEs—MSB’s largest cohort in trade and services—since large corporate clients typically open accounts alongside lending. I then:
Building upon research, we benchmarked global best practices and MSB’s internal account-opening capabilities. Then together with the service blueprints, I execute these activities:
I facilitated multiple workshops among 12 stakeholders (Tech, Ops, Legal, Risk, Compliance, Support, Sales) to co-create an ideal customer journey and business processes, sketch low-fi flows and map required back-office changes. Here is a summary of workshop result:
I organize weekly meetings to sync with Solution Architect, Legal, Risk, Product Policy, IT, Finance, Marketing and the Board for timely approvals. Through the meetings, I figured that vital micro-journeys were missing because our team had had the assumption that it's the job of other teams. It turned out that it's not the case. Here are the missing key micro-journeys:
I also trained our BA on Miro tool and service design principles, so they could support me in creating and enriching sub-journeys/process mapping while I focused on core design decisions.
By phase end, we had a one-year roadmap for the new journey—approved by all stakeholders—and a detailed product specifications for development.
With the roadmap in hand, our UX/UI Designer and BA produced high-fidelity mockups. We then conducted remote usability tests with 6 business agents, 3 SME directors and 2 accountants. Combined with result from Heuristics Evaluation, I compiled the results and proposed these major updates.
During the design process, I synced with designers from other projects & review company design system to check if there are UX patterns we could reuse to avoid re-invent the wheel and preserve consistency across bank applications.
.svg){kind=small}
.svg){kind=small}