Optimising a critical internal platform for
Rwanda’s largest bank
Company
$171m+ in 2021
1250+ employees
Finance
Internal
Rwanda
Team
3
UX/UI designers
1
Developer
1
Project manager
Our engagement with Bank of Kigali, Rwanda’s largest and longest established commercial bank, kicked off with a customer-facing product.
Having delivered the bank’s vision for a modern mobile application, and with an engaged and excited organisation onboard, we turned our attention inwards.
Digital transformation isn’t just about offering something new to customers. It’s incredibly important to redesign, refine and introduce new products and services internally.
Inward-facing products
Too often, products for internal use are never given the UX and UI attention they need, with a big disparity between the user experience of customers and employees.
However, BK is a progressive business who grasped the need for design improvement to their internal tools as well as their customer-focused offering.
As with the mobile banking product, BK’s Digital Factory needed the support of an expert team to help bring the back office in line with the bank’s ambitious vision.
Such a redesign represented a huge challenge but equally a huge opportunity to bring real change to BK by improving its most important system.
A complex internal tool
The internal tools and processes that a bank needs to function are both complex and critical to the success of the organisation.
Bank of Kigali’s back office system is no exception, and the amount of flows involved in this crucial internal tool are immense.
This software essentially runs the bank, with every critical function taking place within it.
From setting and controlling the parameters of accounts to onboarding new customers, managing support requests and storing huge amounts of data.
When you bear in mind BK has almost half a million retail customers, you get a grasp on the enormity of what we’re working with..🤯
Consistent UI design
There was plenty of work to be done when it came to understanding the platform.
First we needed to take a complete overview of the back office offering as it was. We found inconsistent design patterns, unintuitive flows and some confusing UX decisions.
The design system created during our work on the mobile product was intentionally extensible, and could be extended and applied here to easily bring visual consistency.
It was important that this software should be as much a part of the BK experience as the customer-facing parts.
The vision of a sleek, modern platform for them to use energised and excited BK employees. Beautiful UI design isn’t just for the customers!
Complex user flows
In order to make UX improvements we needed to understand how the platform was used.
We created user stories in order to break down who used each section and what they did there, from administrative staff to system admins and treasury team members.
We were then able to form a group of users from the BK team whose expertise about their specialist area we could use to inform our decisions.
Knowing who we’re designing for and what they need to achieve is pretty crucial to success.
Figuring out the areas where team members got stuck completing the tasks they needed to undertake day to day gave us clear insight as we refined the offering.
I was sceptical about working with a team in London who wouldn’t be able to embed themselves into our teams. However, it’s been productive and Lighthouse now know things about BK that we didn’t know about ourselves.
An efficient internal tool
With consistent appearance and intuitive flows, BK’s back office system is now in line with the bank’s bold vision for their future.
BK employees are completing complex user flows quickly, thanks to clearer paths and slick UI, organising the massive volume of information contained within the back office system.
This in turn helps them to be more engaged and work more efficiently, with way less time spent onboarding new members of staff and solving ‘how do I…?’ problems.
New processes and workflows can be easily added when required using the toolkit available – consistency guaranteed.
