Business context

Judo Bank started in 2016 as Australia’s first challenger Small to Medium Enterprise (SME) bank. The key value proposition from Judo is to offer a relationship-led banking experience, which involved banking professionals deeply understanding the customer and their business situation before providing financial products. Technology in this setting is an enabler and not the driver, which has led to the business, which is in a scale up phase, having a lot of manual processes behind the scenes to drive the current relationship-led customer experience.

Design Challenge

Customers rely on human interactions to get access to banking transactional and financial information, which has led to Judo bankers and support staff spending time on low-value administrative tasks impacting their ability to serve our relationship-led offering.

Top three business needs

• Top trivial tasks that lending customers had that impacted Judo staff time
• A digital experience that complemented but did not compete with our banker-led relationship value proposition
• A scalable digital experience platform that would put Judo in a better position to add more digital capabilities and adapt to various product offerings in the future

The team settings and constraints

A multi-faceted team comprised of

• Internal subject matter experts in banking and how the business has been operating so far
• Internal agile delivery manifesto governing our ways of working mentored by a few Agile Coach
• Internal project delivery stakeholders inclusive of Product Owners, Delivery Leads, Legal and Financial Product Managers
• External vendors supporting software development and delivery inclusive of Solutions Architects, Front End and Back End Developers, Scrum Master, Business Analysts and Program Delivery Manager

Evolving technology stack comprised of

• A CORE (Centralised Online Realtime Exchange) banking system that was in the process of retirement to migrate to a modern platform
• Customer data housed in a CRM system adapted for a small-scale non-banking operation