Citizens Bank: Commercial Banking

Executive Summary

Built Commercial Banking's UX practice from zero, delivering award-winning platforms for 75,000+ business clients.

96% Eliminated

Screen scraping traffic (major data security risk)

12 Steps → 4 Steps

Solved #1 customer complaint (45.2% of all feedback)

Weeks → Minutes

Onboarding time for thousands of commercial clients

5 Industry Awards

Including 2025 Innovation of the Year (American Banker)

Project Overview

Timeline: 2021 - Present

Team: Lead Designer, 2 UX Designers, 1-2 UX Researchers, 1 Front-end Developer

My Role as UX Director

Practice Building: Established Commercial Banking's first UX practice from zero. Hired designers, brought in specialized contractors, and coordinated designers and researchers from across the Citizens organization to work on Commercial initiatives. Promoted designers into leadership roles. Secured budget and headcount approvals, establishing UX as a strategic partner to Product and Tech.
Strategic Leadership: Set vision and secured C-suite buy-in for multi-year platform transformation. Identified #1 customer complaint through research synthesis and built a business case that unlocked investment for Commercial Digital Gateway.
Research & Methodology: Introduced new research frameworks (heuristic benchmark analysis, feasibility matrices) that became standard practice. Directed studies that de-risked platform decisions and informed prioritization.
Team Development: Coached designers to present recommendations to senior stakeholders confidently. Team evolved from order-takers to strategic advisors embedded in product planning.
Hands-On Leadership: Maintained design craft—created high-fidelity visionary concepts that inspired leadership and collaborated directly on critical deliverables when needed.
Cross-Functional Influence: Partnered with Product, Tech, and business leaders to maintain customer-centricity throughout delivery. Created reusable templates for team collaboration, now used bank-wide.

The Challenges

Strategic Context: Commercial Banking was Citizens' largest revenue driver, yet its digital team had been significantly underfunded compared to the Retail division. The business had never worked with UX and was facing a critical inflection point: Commercial buyers were getting younger and demanding digital self-service options that matched their consumer banking experiences. While relationships remained vital, expectations had shifted—90% of younger buyers reported dissatisfaction with their banking vendor in at least one area, compared with 71% of older buyers. We risked losing high-value clients to digital-first competitors.

My Challenge: Introduce a business area to strategic UX partnership and deliver transformative digital experiences with a focused team. I needed to coach a Discovery-driven approach, maintain a long-term vision, and use research to identify high-impact opportunities and validate that we were on track.

Our biggest hurdle? The commercial banking team relied heavily on expensive third-party vendor solutions that created significant problems:

Security Risk: Clients managed separate login credentials for multiple vendor platforms, often reusing the same credentials, which created vulnerabilities. Many resorted to writing passwords on sticky notes, compounding the security risk.
Poor User Experience: Vendor platforms had steep learning curves with significant usability and accessibility issues. Clients struggled with complex interfaces that made basic banking tasks difficult.
Trust Issues: Constantly jumping between different vendor platforms with minimal branding eroded trust and created a disjointed experience.
Operational Inefficiency: The #1 customer complaint was login complexity. In survey data, 45.2% of responses included login issues. Onboarding and enrollment took weeks, instead of minutes.

The Solutions

Commercial Digital Gateway

Overview: Rather than simply replacing expensive vendor solutions, we envisioned a centralized platform that would consolidate fragmented experiences, eliminate security risks, and surface clients' most critical tasks through intelligent APIs. We built each phase towards this long-term vision.

Phase 1 - Universal ID: Eliminating Security Risks

Problem: Clients managed 20+ separate vendor credentials, resorting to sticky notes and password reuse.
Solution: Single sign-on that allowed clients to link all vendor credentials to one unique ID.
Impact: Eliminated security risks from managing multiple passwords and streamlined login.

Phase 2 - Instant Onboarding: Improving Operational Inefficiency

Problem: Client onboarding took weeks due to manual, email-based internal processes and scattered data systems—creating poor first impressions and delaying time-to-value.
Solution: Colleague-facing Salesforce application that digitized internal workflows and centralized client data, enabling relationship managers to activate clients seamlessly.
Impact: Transformed the client's first experience—onboarding reduced from weeks to minutes for thousands of clients, allowing immediate access to banking services.

Phase 3 - Login and Enrollment: Addressing the #1 Customer Complaint

Problem: 45.2% of survey responses cited login complexity—12 steps to log in for the first time.
Solution: Redesigned enrollment flow, reducing steps from 12 to 4 (75% reduction).
Impact: Addressed top complaint for 75,000+ users; now handles 26,000+ logins and 80+ new enrollments per day.

Phase 4 - Open Banking API Platform: Leveling Up Poor User Experiences

Problem: Clients struggled with complex vendor platforms with steep learning curves and poor accessibility.
Solution: Used APIs to surface top tasks in an intuitive dashboard, keeping clients in one branded experience.
Impact: Eliminated 96% of screen scraping for 85% of business clients. Extended across Retail, Business, Commercial, Wealth, and Private Banking.

First-time login and enrollment pitch deck

Desirability and best-worst scaling concept testing

Persona definition and journey mapping

Prioritization with red route and heuristic evaluation

Flows and low-fidelity wireframes

Visual mock-ups and AB testing

Digital Butler

With the Commercial Digital Gateway foundation established, we identified an opportunity to elevate the experience for our most valuable client segment: those with white-glove commercial relationships.

Problem: Commercial clients with white-glove relationships needed personalized, concierge-level support that matched the premium nature of their banking relationship. These clients consistently ranked their relationship with their support team as the most valuable aspect of Citizens' service and as the bank's key differentiator. However, existing support tools felt generic and disconnected from the core banking platform, failing to deliver the integrated, premium experience these high-value clients expected.

My Strategy: I set the vision that Butler must feel like an integral part of our core banking platform, not a separate web app. My strategy was to reinforce the seamless, white-glove experience and maintain trust through consistent branding. I worked hands-on with the team to create conceptual visuals, combining our ideas into a compelling presentation that inspired leadership to fund the end-to-end design of Digital Butler. I remained deeply engaged throughout delivery, providing real-time actionable feedback and jumping in to do hands-on design work multiple times to ensure we realized this vision.

Solution: A white-glove digital platform seamlessly integrated into Commercial Digital Gateway, featuring:

Live chat for immediate support from relationship managers
AI assistant for common questions and self-service
Meeting scheduler integrated with relationship managers' calendars
Status tracker for implementing new banking products and services
File upload and management for secure document sharing

Impact:

$60K annual savings from reduced vendor dependency
Elevated digital experience to match premium client relationships
Strengthened the relationship-driven differentiator that clients valued most
Contributed to the platform winning multiple innovation awards

Commercial leadership workshop

Storyboards for the Digital Butler mobile app

Digital Butler integrated AI designs

Impact

Business Results:

Eliminated 96% of screen scraping traffic from vendor platforms
Reduced onboarding from weeks to minutes for thousands of business and commercial clients
$60K annual savings from reduced vendor dependency
Reduced #1 customer complaint (login complexity) affecting 75K+ users (26,000+ logins and 80+ new enrollments per day)

Customer Results:

First-time login and enrollment steps reduced from 12 to 4
Consolidated 20+ vendor logins into a single SSO
Made critical banking tasks accessible on an easy-to-use dashboard vs. complex vendor software
Improved baseline usability and accessibility across all platforms

Industry Recognition:

2023 BAI Global Innovation Award for Innovation in Commercial Banking Digital Experience
2023 Cash Management and Payments Impact Award for Customer Experience (Datos Insights)
2024 Model Bank Award for Commercial Customer Engagement (Celent)
2025 Innovation of the Year Award (American Banker)
2025 Big Bank Theory Award for Best New Embedded Finance Platform

Organizational Impact:

Built a UX practice from the ground up in the Commercial Banking sector
Extended platform innovation across Retail, Business, Commercial, Wealth, and Private Banking through unified APIs and scalable, themeable design system components

Key Takeaway

Strategic UX practice isn't about doing less; it's about building toward a long-term vision with a disciplined process.

Building Commercial Banking's UX practice from zero required introducing a business area to the full depth of what a strategic UX team could deliver. We didn't scrape by with minimal success. We operated with a strong Discovery-focused process and a test-and-learn mentality, utilizing research to identify opportunities and validate that we were on track toward our vision. By maintaining a long-term view of the platform we were building (Universal ID → Login → API Platform → Digital Butler), each phase created a foundation for the next. We had resource constraints, but even with a larger budget, we would have continued to operate in the same way. The result wasn't just business success; it was a transformed relationship where Commercial leaders now see UX as an essential strategic partner. We have proven that a disciplined, strategically focused UX team with strong research foundations can drive measurable business outcomes and earn trust that scales across the organization.