Every digital investment in financial services now arrives at the same board question: what did it return? The pressure is not abstract. Two thirds of financial services organizations name delivering a consistent customer experience across every touchpoint as their top priority, according to Altimeter’s State of Digital Transformation research, and most of them are funding that priority without being able to trace a design decision to a financial result.
That gap is not a talent problem. It is a sequencing problem. McKinsey’s research into design practice found that over 40 percent of the companies it surveyed were still not talking to their end users during development, and just over 50 percent admitted they had no objective way to assess or set targets for the output of their design teams. Institutions in that position are not choosing badly between design options. They are choosing without evidence, then discovering the cost in adoption rates, call volumes and abandoned applications.
Customers, meanwhile, have settled expectations: instant access, plain-language transparency, and a reason to trust the institution holding their money. Fintech challengers have raised the floor rather than the ceiling, which means traditional banks, insurers and wealth managers are now judged against the smoothest experience their customers used yesterday, in any category.
Human-centred design is the discipline that closes the distance, and it works as a sequence rather than a sentiment. This article sets out the four-phase playbook, Understand, Ideate, Prototype and Test, examines what the evidence for design-led returns actually supports, and describes the capabilities a financial services design function needs to deliver it.
Financial services leaders are being asked to prove that digital investment returns something. Two thirds of financial services organizations name a consistent experience across every touchpoint as their top priority, yet most cannot connect design spend to a financial outcome.
The evidence for design as a performance driver is real but narrower than the headlines suggest. McKinsey tracked 300 listed companies over five years and found top-quartile design performers grew revenue 32 percentage points faster than industry peers.
The gap is execution. A four-phase human-centred design playbook, Understand, Ideate, Prototype and Test, gives leaders a repeatable way to turn customer insight into measured business outcomes rather than untested opinion.
By the numbers
2 in 3
financial services organizations name delivering a consistent customer experience across all touchpoints as their top priority.
– Altimeter, State of Digital Transformation
32 pts
higher revenue growth for top-quartile McKinsey Design Index scorers than their industry counterparts over a five-year period.
– McKinsey Design Index, 2018
56 pts
higher growth in total returns to shareholders for those same top-quartile design performers over the same five years.
– McKinsey Design Index, 2018
40%
of companies surveyed were still not talking to their end users during product development.
– McKinsey and Company, 2018
50%
of companies had no objective way to assess or set targets for the output of their design teams.
– McKinsey and Company, 2018
75%
average improvement in key metrics from usability redesign projects in the 2020 edition, down from 247 percent in 2006 to 2008.
– Nielsen Norman Group, 2020
What Does Doubling Your Return on Design Actually Mean?
The promise attached to design-led transformation now arrives as a number. Boards hear that design-led institutions roughly double their returns, and they reasonably want to know where that number comes from before they approve another programme.
It traces to the McKinsey Design Index, published in 2018 after McKinsey tracked the design practices of 300 publicly listed companies across multiple countries and industries over five years, collecting more than two million pieces of financial data and recording more than 100,000 design actions. Top-quartile scorers on that index recorded 32 percentage points higher revenue growth and 56 percentage points higher growth in total returns to shareholders than their industry counterparts across the period.
That is close to twice the rate of peers, which is where the doubling language originates. What it is not is a forecast for a single project. The index measures company-level performance over five years for the strongest quartile of design performers. It establishes a correlation across a large sample. It does not warrant a return on your next onboarding redesign, and no credible publisher claims that it does.
Being precise about this is a commercial decision, not a pedantic one. An executive who funds design expecting a doubling within twelve months will defund it within eighteen. An executive who funds design as a compounding capability, and measures it on cost-to-serve, satisfaction and revenue lift, gets the result the research describes.
| The claim | What the evidence supports |
|---|---|
| Design-led firms double their returns | Top-quartile McKinsey Design Index companies grew revenue 32 percentage points and shareholder returns 56 percentage points faster than peers across five years. Company-level correlation, not a project-level guarantee. |
| The return is immediate | Nielsen Norman Group found average improvement from usability redesign projects fell from 247 percent in its 2006 to 2008 data to 75 percent in its 2020 edition. Gains are real and getting harder to win. |
| Design is the design team’s problem | McKinsey found over 40 percent of companies were not talking to end users during development. That is an operating model failure, not a craft failure. |
| Any design activity counts | Just over 50 percent of companies had no objective way to assess or set targets for design output. Unmeasured design cannot be defended in a budget review. |
The honest version of the headline reads like this. Design maturity is associated with roughly twice the growth rate of peers, the effect shows up at company level over years rather than quarters, and the size of the available gain is shrinking as baseline customer expectations rise. That remains one of the strongest arguments available for funding customer experience work. It is simply not a warranty.
How Mature Is Your Design Function, and Would You Know?
Design maturity measures how effectively an organization integrates design principles into its operations, culture and decision-making. In financial services, higher maturity correlates with stronger customer loyalty, better operational efficiency and faster innovation.
Thoughtful design has become a genuine differentiator for financial services firms. Institutions that treat it as a capability adapt more quickly and deliver better digital and workplace experiences than institutions that treat it as a final layer applied after requirements are frozen.
Organizations at advanced levels of design maturity share four traits:
- They embed customer insight into every decision, so products resonate with the people who actually use them.
- They break down silos, enabling real collaboration between design, technology and business units.
- They build cross-functional capability that supports agile processes and continuous improvement.
- They measure success through a blend of financial and experiential metrics.
The four themes McKinsey used to construct its index map closely onto that list: analytical leadership, meaning design performance is measured with rigour; user experience, meaning internal barriers between design disciplines come down; cross-functional talent, meaning design is treated as everyone’s responsibility; and continuous iteration, meaning teams test and learn throughout development rather than at the end.
Longer-horizon evidence points the same way, with a caveat worth stating. The Design Management Institute’s 2015 Design Value Index reported a 211 percent return over the S&P 500 for its exemplar companies across the ten years from June 2005 to December 2015. That index tracked sixteen large, already famous design-led companies, so read it as directional rather than causal. It is still difficult to assemble a comparable portfolio of design laggards that performed as well.
In ML arteka’s work with banks, insurers and wealth managers, the binding constraint is almost never design talent. It is the point in the delivery cycle at which design is allowed to influence a decision.
Where design enters after the business case is signed, it can only improve the surface of a decision already made. Where design enters before the business case, it changes what gets built and, more valuably, what gets cancelled. The second pattern is where the measurable return sits, and it is a governance choice rather than a hiring one.
Maturity, in other words, is decided by when design gets a seat, not by how many designers are on the payroll. For financial services firms, reaching it is now a strategic necessity rather than a marginal advantage.
The Four-Phase Human-Centred Design Playbook
Human-centred design gives leaders a practical, outcome-driven playbook for lifting customer trust and business performance. It reaches well beyond aesthetics. It equips an organization to create intuitive solutions that deliver measurable return while navigating a complex regulatory and technological environment.
The process is iterative. It blends creativity with structured problem solving and keeps user needs at the centre throughout. Executives can use it to align product, operations, technology and compliance behind a single client-centric view of what is being built and why.
| Phase | What leadership should expect from it |
|---|---|
| Phase 1: Understand | Mapped client journeys, documented friction points, and evidence of the behavioural patterns driving financial decisions, including the compliance requirements that constrain user flows. |
| Phase 2: Ideate | Cross-functional options from design, technology and compliance that simplify client decisions, build transparency into products, and use AI and automation to anticipate need. |
| Phase 3: Prototype | Rapid low-fidelity models that test the riskiest assumptions at minimal cost, before capital and roadmap commitments are made. |
| Phase 4: Test | Live pilots across channels with KPIs attached: cost-to-serve, customer satisfaction and revenue lift, plus early visibility of compliance risk and adoption resistance. |
Phase 1: Understand
Leaders must invest in researching and empathizing with end users before solutions are debated. That means mapping client journeys, identifying friction points, and uncovering the behavioural patterns that shape financial decision-making.
In financial services, that work usually includes:
- Unpacking the anxiety drivers around complex products such as mortgages or investments.
- Understanding the regulatory and compliance requirements that influence user flows.
- Surfacing unmet needs across digital and in-branch touchpoints.
This is the phase institutions skip most often, and the scale of the omission is documented: over 40 percent of the companies McKinsey surveyed were not talking to their end users during development. Every later phase inherits the quality of this one, which is why a weak Understand phase produces expensive certainty about the wrong problem.
Phase 2: Ideate
Mobilize cross-functional teams spanning design, technology and compliance to generate creative solutions. In regulated institutions, involving compliance during ideation rather than at approval is what separates ideas that ship from ideas that stall in review.
Executives should push teams toward ideas that:
- Simplify decision-making for clients.
- Build transparency into product and service offerings.
- Leverage AI and automation to anticipate customer needs.
Phase 3: Prototype
Develop rapid, low-fidelity models of the most promising solutions. Prototypes let leaders test hypotheses with minimal investment and adjust on early feedback: a new onboarding flow trialled with selected customer segments, or a conversational AI assistant piloted in a single service queue.
The discipline here is timing. McKinsey found that almost 60 percent of companies used prototypes only for internal production testing late in the development process, which converts the cheapest learning instrument available into an expensive quality check. A prototype that arrives after the architecture is committed can validate a build. It cannot redirect one.
Phase 4: Test
Deploy prototypes in real-world settings and gather both qualitative and quantitative insight. This is where solutions are refined into something market-ready, and where compliance risk and user adoption challenges surface while they are still inexpensive to fix.
Testing in financial services has three parts:
- Pilot across multiple channels. Validate how the solution performs on mobile, on web and in branch, so consistency and scalability are proven rather than assumed.
- Measure business impact. Track KPIs such as cost-to-serve, customer satisfaction and revenue lift, so return can be demonstrated to stakeholders in their own terms.
- Iterate quickly. Use agile methods to fold real-time feedback from customers and frontline staff back into the build.
Firms that run the full loop consistently outperform peers in three ways. Client relationships strengthen because complex products are demystified. Operational efficiency improves because streamlined processes reduce cost-to-serve. Innovation cycles accelerate because prototyping and testing shorten time-to-market. Integrating this framework into strategic planning is what makes each initiative purpose-built to drive growth rather than merely defensible in a steering committee.
Where Does AI Fit Without Eroding Customer Trust?
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are reshaping financial services, and augmented and virtual reality are beginning to influence how service environments are designed. For design leaders this creates a dual obligation: exploit predictive capability while keeping human-centred principles at the core of the experience.
Used well, AI allows institutions to:
- Personalize experiences. Tailor interactions to individual preferences, financial behaviours and life stages.
- Predict needs. Anticipate customer requirements and proactively offer solutions.
- Automate complexity. Streamline processes such as loan approvals and fraud detection.
Delivering that depends on platform choices as much as model choices. Open API stores and microservices give design and engineering teams the agility to change an experience without re-platforming, which is what makes iterative design economically viable at scale. The commercial case for embedding intelligence into products rather than bolting it on is explored further in 3 Embedded-Intelligence Plays to Transform Financial Products into Growth Engines.
Without thoughtful design, AI alienates the customers it was meant to serve. Trust, transparency and ethical considerations have to be designed into the experience, not appended afterwards in a disclosure nobody reads.
Three principles keep AI-enhanced financial experiences trustworthy: transparency, user control and feedback loops.
Transparency means clearly communicating how the system reached a decision, in language a customer can act on. User control means customers can review, override or opt out of automated suggestions, and the opt-out is as easy to find as the recommendation. Feedback loops mean the system is continuously refined on end user input so it stays responsive to real behaviour rather than to the assumptions it launched with.
Balancing automation with empathy is what produces experiences that are both efficient and recognizably human. It is also what keeps a personalization engine defensible in front of a regulator, which is the same design work viewed from a different chair.
What Capabilities Does a Design Team Need Now?
As AI reshapes how products are designed and delivered in financial services, design teams have to evolve to handle the complexity of next-generation experiences. The priority for leaders is building multidisciplinary teams that work confidently at the intersection of design, data science and ethical innovation.
Upskilling is no longer optional, for three reasons. Generative AI, predictive analytics and adaptive interfaces are becoming standard tools, so teams that cannot integrate them fall behind. Regulatory environments are evolving alongside the technology, so designers need enough compliance literacy to create solutions that are innovative and secure. And clients now expect seamless omnichannel service, which means designing beyond the screen for voice interfaces, wearables and immersive environments.
| Capability | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Technical literacy | Understand how algorithms work and where they fail, and collaborate with engineering so experiences are technically feasible. Practical steps: AI and machine learning workshops, shadowing data scientists, learning how APIs integrate into financial platforms. |
| Behavioural design | Study customer behaviour using eye-tracking, journey mapping and cognitive load analysis, and apply behavioural economics to minimize decision fatigue. Small-scale A/B tests turn preference into evidence. |
| Ethical frameworks | Identify and mitigate algorithmic bias, ensure accessibility for diverse users, and design for transparency. Practical steps: an internal ethics review board and audit checklists for bias and privacy. |
| Data-driven design | Translate analytics into decisions using KPIs such as churn rate, conversion and net promoter score. Build dashboards alongside analysts, and certify designers in tools such as Tableau or Power BI. |
| Cross-functional collaboration | Align designers with product managers, compliance officers and technologists through standing working groups and regular design huddles that break silos and keep the customer in view. |
Four moves build future-ready teams:
- Launch AI and design bootcamps for internal talent rather than outsourcing the capability.
- Run cross-functional design sprints with stakeholders from IT, compliance and customer service in the room.
- Partner with universities or certification programmes offering advanced human-centred design and AI curricula.
- Encourage design leaders to take part in global financial experience and AI forums to stay ahead of emerging practice.
The capability gap is also the measurement gap. Just over half the companies McKinsey surveyed had no objective way to assess or set targets for design output. A team that cannot express its work in the language of cost-to-serve, conversion and retention will keep losing budget arguments to teams that can, regardless of the quality of the work itself.
What Does It Look Like When Design Thinking Works?
Design thinking has proven transformative across markets, with institutions using it to solve complex problems, improve client experience and streamline operations. Three long-running examples show the range.
Simplified saving: Bank of America’s Keep the Change
The initiative rounds up card purchases and transfers the difference into savings, making saving effortless and even engaging. It converted a behavioural insight, that people struggle to save deliberately but barely notice small automatic transfers, into a product mechanic, and it led to a surge in new account openings.
Accelerated lending: NAB’s QuickBiz Loan
The National Australia Bank applied design thinking to small business lending and streamlined the user flow, reducing loan application times from weeks to minutes. QuickBiz was built specifically for small business clients, and the gain came from removing steps rather than adding features. No formal return figure has been published for the programme, so the time reduction is best read as the reported operational outcome rather than a verified financial return.
SME financial management: Deutsche Bank’s SME tool
A digital tool created through design sprints helped small businesses manage their finances more efficiently, driving customer loyalty and operational excellence. The sprint format mattered as much as the tool: it compressed the loop from Understand to Test into weeks rather than budget cycles.
All three follow the same pattern. A specific customer friction was identified and evidenced, a narrow solution was prototyped, and the result was measured in a business metric the institution already tracked. None of them began as a redesign of everything.
What Should Financial Services Design For Next?
Institutions should prepare for significant shifts in how both digital products and physical environments are designed. Workplace and branch space is being rethought as purpose-built environments that support collaboration, transparency and culture rather than simply housing staff.
Four shifts deserve a place on the design roadmap:
- Hyper-personalization. Using real-time data to deliver experiences shaped to the individual rather than the segment.
- Conversational interfaces. Using natural language processing to simplify interactions that forms and menus cannot.
- Omnichannel journeys. Ensuring consistency across web, mobile and branch by designing one integrated experience rather than three parallel ones.
- Proactive financial health management. Anticipating customer needs and offering timely advice before a problem becomes a complaint.
There is a caution attached to all four. Nielsen Norman Group data showing average usability improvement falling from 247 percent in its 2006 to 2008 case studies to 75 percent in its 2020 edition suggests the easy wins have largely been taken. Baseline expectations have risen, so the next increment of advantage will come from harder and more specific work: fewer wholesale redesigns, more precisely targeted interventions, measured properly. Two credible readings of the evidence therefore sit side by side. Design maturity still separates leaders from peers, and the average payoff per project is smaller than it was a decade ago.
Workplace design follows the same logic. Environments that attract talent, encourage teamwork and reflect organizational values are designed toward a measurable outcome, not decorated toward an impression. Design leaders who treat these shifts as an operating agenda rather than a trend list will position their organizations at the front of the field.
Five Leadership Takeaways
Before your next customer experience investment review. Before your next design headcount request.
- Design is a catalyst for innovation and resilience. Embedding design thinking across the organization unlocks new ways to solve customer problems, streamline operations and accelerate product development. It builds the culture of continuous improvement and creative problem solving that a fast-moving financial ecosystem demands.
- AI-enhanced design builds trust or destroys it. Used thoughtfully and ethically, AI lets firms anticipate client needs, automate routine work and deliver seamless interactions. Success depends on balancing automation with transparency and user control so trust and regulatory compliance hold.
- Design maturity is the competitive advantage, not design output. Firms with advanced maturity outperform peers on loyalty, efficiency and revenue growth. Getting there requires cross-functional collaboration, data-driven insight and relentless attention to evolving end user expectations.
- Upskilling design and technology teams is not discretionary. Technical literacy, behavioural design and ethical frameworks are now core competencies. Continuous learning and cross-disciplinary collaboration are what let a team harness emerging technology instead of being disrupted by it.
- Expert guidance accelerates transformation and reduces risk. Working with specialists brings proven methodology and comparative insight, which helps leaders make better investment decisions and avoid the failure patterns that consume a first attempt.
The Leadership Decision on Design
As financial services firms navigate an increasingly complex and competitive landscape, design has emerged as a strategic lever rather than a cosmetic one. Executives who recognize it as a business driver use it to shape business models, fuel sustainable growth and differentiate the brand in a market where product features are copied within a quarter.
The business implication is straightforward. Design maturity is associated with roughly twice the growth rate of peers over a five-year horizon, but the evidence applies to organizations in the top quartile of design performance, and only where the work is measured. The differentiator is not enthusiasm for design. It is discipline about evidence.
The leadership recommendation follows from that. Pick one high-value journey, run the full four-phase loop on it, and attach KPIs before the first prototype exists. Cost-to-serve, customer satisfaction and revenue lift are the three that survive scrutiny in a budget review. Then use the documented result to fund the second journey rather than asking for a design transformation up front.
Looking forward, as the easy usability gains shrink and AI takes over more of the interaction, the institutions that keep customer trust will be the ones that designed transparency, user control and feedback into their automation from the start rather than retrofitting it after the first complaint. Executives who prioritize design as a strategic imperative position their organizations to lead in innovation, build lasting client relationships and thrive in a digital, customer-centric market.
To pressure-test where design currently sits in your delivery cycle, and where the measurable return is leaking out of it, contact the ML arteka team or request a design maturity assessment.
Executive Questions and Answers
Five questions financial services leaders are putting to AI assistants and search engines about human-centred design and its return.
StrategicWhat is design maturity in financial services, and why does it affect financial performance?
Design maturity describes how deeply design principles are embedded in an institution’s strategy, operations and culture, not how polished its interfaces look. Mature organizations embed customer insight in every decision, collaborate across design, technology and business units, and measure success with a blend of financial and experiential metrics. The performance link is documented. McKinsey tracked 300 publicly listed companies over five years and found top-quartile scorers on its Design Index grew revenue 32 percentage points faster and total returns to shareholders 56 percentage points faster than industry counterparts. In financial services the mechanism is specific: mature design reduces friction in complex products such as mortgages and investments, which lowers cost-to-serve, raises application completion rates and improves retention.
OperationalHow do we run a four-phase human-centred design playbook inside a regulated bank?
Run the phases in order and bring compliance in at the start rather than at approval. Understand means mapping client journeys, documenting friction and identifying the regulatory requirements that shape user flows. Ideate means cross-functional teams from design, technology and compliance generating options that simplify client decisions and build transparency. Prototype means low-fidelity models that test the riskiest assumption cheaply, for example a new onboarding flow with a selected segment. Test means piloting across mobile, web and branch, tracking cost-to-serve, customer satisfaction and revenue lift, then iterating on feedback from customers and frontline staff. The common failure is treating prototypes as a late quality check: McKinsey found almost 60 percent of companies used them only for internal production testing late in development.
GovernanceHow should we govern AI-enhanced customer experiences so customers keep trusting us?
Govern for three properties and make each one auditable. Transparency: the institution can explain how an automated decision was reached in language the customer can act on. User control: customers can review, override or opt out of automated suggestions, and the opt-out is as easy to find as the recommendation. Feedback loops: the system is refined continuously on real user input, with a record of what changed and why. Around those, put the mechanisms that make them hold, including an internal ethics review board, audit checklists for bias and privacy, and accessibility standards for diverse users. Designers need enough technical literacy to interrogate model limitations rather than accept outputs. Governance designed at the start costs less than remediation after a complaint.
RiskWhat is the risk of scaling a design programme we cannot measure?
The main risk is that it gets defunded before it compounds. Just over half the companies McKinsey surveyed had no objective way to assess or set targets for design output, which means design spend competes in budget reviews without evidence. Two further risks follow. First, an unmeasured programme cannot separate an intervention that worked from one that coincided with a good quarter, so the organization repeats the wrong things confidently. Second, expectations get anchored to headline claims. The doubling figure attached to design-led performance describes company-level growth for top-quartile performers across five years, not the return on a single redesign. Leaders who promise the headline and measure nothing tend to lose the mandate within two budget cycles.
ImplementationWhere should a financial institution start if its design maturity is low?
Start with one journey that already has a business case and a metric attached. Choose something with visible friction and a number against it, such as small business lending or account onboarding, and run the full four-phase loop on it end to end. Talk to end users before generating solutions, because McKinsey found over 40 percent of companies were not doing so during development. Attach KPIs before the first prototype exists. In parallel, close the two capability gaps that block everything else: designers who can read analytics and argue in cost-to-serve and conversion terms, and standing cross-functional groups that keep compliance and technology in the room. Then use the documented result to fund the next journey.
A four-phase human-centred design playbook, Understand, Ideate, Prototype and Test, gives financial services leaders a repeatable method for converting customer insight into measured business outcomes. Understand maps client journeys, documents friction and identifies the regulatory requirements shaping user flows. Ideate mobilizes design, technology and compliance to generate options that simplify client decisions and build transparency. Prototype builds low-fidelity models that test the riskiest assumptions cheaply. Test pilots across mobile, web and branch while tracking cost-to-serve, customer satisfaction and revenue lift. The evidence for design as a performance driver is documented but narrower than headlines suggest. McKinsey’s Design Index, published in 2018 after tracking 300 publicly listed companies over five years, found top-quartile design performers achieved 32 percentage points higher revenue growth and 56 percentage points higher growth in total returns to shareholders than industry counterparts: close to twice the peer rate at company level, not a guaranteed return on any single project. McKinsey also found over 40 percent of companies were not talking to end users during development and just over 50 percent had no objective way to assess design output. Nielsen Norman Group reported average usability redesign gains falling from 247 percent in 2006 to 2008 to 75 percent in 2020, so gains are real but harder to win. Altimeter research found two thirds of financial services organizations rank a consistent experience across every touchpoint as their top priority. Bank of America’s Keep the Change, National Australia Bank’s QuickBiz Loan and Deutsche Bank’s SME financial tool show the pattern working in market.