Small Businesses' Money Movement Needs

@ Zions Bancorporation

I led this generative research project at Zions Bancorporation. The high-level objective of the study is to understand how users (small business customers) manage and execute their money movement needs.

(The visuals you see on this page are coming from my final UXR report. It is to provide additional context and serve as presentation examples)

Background and Goals

The bank offers a suite of products to help small businesses manage their treasury operations, bookkeeping, and accounting needs. The bank needed to better understand its users to focus on which product initiatives would be most impactful.

Research Goals

1. Understand the customer's Jobs-to-be-Done regarding money movement.

2. Understand the satisfaction level of customers with respect to making and receiving payments, as well as any pain points in this process.

3. Understand why a customer may use another bank or FinTech platform to achieve these functions and what they like or dislike about these services

Method

To achieve these research goals, I conducted a 2-part study that consisted of a total of 20 in-depth interviews with external customers of the bank. In the first part of the study, I used a semi-structured interview style with a focus on open-ended questions to provide more flexibility and dive deeper into each customer’s experience and needs. In part 2 of the study, I conducted a structured interview style in order to extract specific information that stakeholders had requested.

Key Insights

Upon discussing money movement needs with small businesses it became clear that all have similar needs, however their pain points in the process were unique to their industry/type of business. A key determinant for the level of support a business will need for money movement was based on who is doing the accounting for the company. A business whose owner is managing this process will require much more support than a company with a specified accountant or equivalent role. Users want integration from their bank and accounting software to seamlessly track incoming and outgoing payments and invoice management.

Research Impact

Strategic Impact

Leadership prioritized products related to the pain points found in this study.
Products that were antiquated and did not meet the customers’ needs were de-prioritized.
Previously created user personas were expanded upon with this research.

Stakeholder Collaboration Impact

Designed new strategies to better support small business customers with solutions tailored to their needs.
I presented this research study at the annual banking affiliate conference, which consisted of the presidents and senior leadership of each affiliate. The CEO and other senior leadership members requested future qualitative research following this study.

My Learnings

Involving stakeholders early gets more buy-in and overall support for the project. They are willing to lend resources and help when fully bought in.
Stakeholders’ needs require different question types. Broad open-ended questions will uncover details not yet considered, while specific questions will provide deeper insight into our current understanding.