About
IInsights Center is CaixaBank’s research hub, created to enable the organization to design an omnichannel experience based on a 360º customer-centric approach.
Innovation presentation
It is not enough to survive in a new digital ecosystem in banking. It's imperative to thrive. And in order to do so, traditional banks are challenging their ways of working, and redesigning their strategies to create experiences that truly improve people’s lives.
Creating these experiences requires to understand our users deeply and to constantly feed the decision-making teams with powerful, timely, and continuous customer insights, to craft the best omnichannel experience. With this in mind, CaixaBank launched its Insights Center in February 2022. CaixaBank’s research hub, created to enable the organization to design an omnichannel experience, based on a 360º customer-centric approach.
The Insights Center’s goal is to help CaixaBank Labs and the whole organization to design competitive solutions that balance business, technology, and financial wellbeing, using qualitative and quantitative design research methods at its core. This approach helps the organization to obtain actualized, precise, objective, actionable, and robust data and customer insights. This can, in turn, help the business to future-proof the offering by connecting it to the constantly evolving customer needs.
What makes the Insights Center an innovation in the financial ecosystem design landscape is:
A 360º customer-centric approach, connecting with a massive array of users:
- +20,000 users from all customer and employee segments, non-clients, business, companies, VIP clients, foreign clients, and any kind of specific user;
- +1,000 employees of the CaixaBank branches and business units;
- +120 research topics per year;
- +500 qualitative and quantitative research sessions per year;
- +20 sessions focused on accessibility; and
- +1,000 insights used to integrate the user’s perspective when designing any product or service.
A seamless digital and physical laboratory that cover all experience touchpoints:
- 450m2, built to conduct research on financial and banking experiences;
- 7 spaces that recreate the whole omnichannel experience with all touchpoints: Underground station, a street, a CaixaBank’s branch, a store, user’s home, ATM square, exhibitors, etc.;
- Workrooms designed to analyze, co-create, and test customer journeys at CaixaBank: Ideation room, co-creation room, observation rooms, knowledge sharing spaces, and a Mobile Lab;
- With online research tools that helps to easily meet and collaborate remotely with all the diversity of users; and
- Pop-up laboratories at any real space that requires a direct observation, branches, business, on the street, etc..
Cutting-edge research technology focused on financial customer experience:
- Audio-visual system to capture images and audio from any space;
- Neuroscience devices to explore emotions, perceptions, and cognitive load;
- Biometrical devices to explore physical reactions;
- Eye tracking devices to analyze the attention grabbers within digital interfaces;
- Latest software to conduct online and offline qualitative and quantitative research.
A high-performing team of research specialists in human behaviour and finances:
- Multidisciplinary team that provides CaixaBank with a disruptive perspective, totally focused on the needs of the user team of 15 UX specialized researchers;
- Research specialists from +11 disciplines to create a truly diverse team: PhD researchers, psychology, anthropology, sociology, innovation, maths, statistics, marketing, broadcasting, engineering.
- An embedded network of +50 UX designers that identifies research opportunities and conducts tactical research;
- Network of research providers that supports in highly specialized topics; and
- ResearchOps team that guarantees the right recruitment and digital and physical tools availability.
Research conducted using the latest trends in user experience design:
- Behavioural economics;
- Connecting big data with ethnographic data, making data more meaningful;
- Understanding and testing the User Experience of digital and physical experiences through neuroscience;
- Applying a scientific method to our variety of investigation approaches;
- Ethnographic research focused on understanding people’s interaction with the financial and banking ecosystem; and
- Co-creation and collaborative design.
Fully integrated in an agile and design culture environment:
- Strategic and tactical research integrated in the discoveries, prioritization of backlogs, and squad sprints;
- A trigger to bring the company closer to a design-thinking mindset through research practice and co-creation methods;
- A way to connect teams through a collaborative design process; and
- Participating actively in the whole design process: Understand, define, and test.
A knowledge hub open to all parts of the organization:
- Identifying improvements, opportunities, and framing problems to build meaningful solutions;
- Connecting all the insights to generate a unique strategic and tactical knowledge;
- Creating frameworks to efficiently spread useful research insights and results;
- Digital and shared repository where all the insights are published;
- Collaborative digital tools to define and conduct new research; and
- Knowledge Hub about financial management and financial wellbeing, where insights are built and shared.
The Insights Center is key to ensure that CaixaBank has the right insights to empathize with its users and customers, to grow the business and to forecast the best financial and banking experiences for everyone. It is the investment the bank has made to foster and grow its Research & Development strategy.
Uniqueness of the project
The Project is unique because:
- It guarantees a 360º customer-centric approach, helping the organization to stay tuned-in with all kinds of customer’s needs, connect these insights to the development of the bank’s offering, and generating a unique knowledge base that helps the business units make decisions.
- It has a brand new 450m2 laboratory, with cutting-edge technology to cover all the omnichannel customer journey touchpoints in a financial and banking relationship.
- It integrates the research practice in an agile culture and organization, being a trigger to change how the organization designs and delivers value to users, using an embedded network of UX design ambassadors.
