Qore Banking Platform, Redesigning a Product That Was Losing Clients

The Problem

Two data sources pointed the same way. Product analytics showed where end customers were failing: task abandonment concentrated in two flows, fund transfers and account overview. Eight months of support-ticket verbatims told the same story from the customer's side: the same two flows, plus repeated complaints about web-and-mobile inconsistency. When behavioural data and support data independently surface the same failure points, you stop guessing where the problem is. There are two user groups in play, and the distinction matters. The end customers are consumers using the app to move money and manage accounts, they're who I designed for. But the buyers are the commercial banks, whose operations teams, product managers, and branch staff live with the platform on behalf of their customers. For the banks, end-customer friction isn't an inconvenience, it's what turns into a reason to switch vendors at contract renewal. Fixing the customer experience was how I fixed the bank's reason to leave.

Navigation was fragmented. The mobile product felt bolted on rather than designed, and the inconsistency between web and mobile eroded customer trust session to session — which, for a white-labelled product, is the bank's trust too. Every failed transfer or confusing screen was a customer losing confidence in their bank, not in Qore, which is exactly why it surfaced at renewal.

Leadership accepted the argument. My mandate: scope what was fixable in one product cycle and ship something that moved retention before the next board review. That framing mattered. It meant every decision in the following 16 weeks had to answer the same question: does this reduce churn, or doesn't it?

Constraints

Sixteen weeks. No existing design system: two years of inconsistent components had left engineering building one-off solutions for recurring patterns. A dev team with strong opinions about what was too risky to change. A PM who wanted to ship everything. Stakeholders who kept adding scope. And user research that was two years out of date. None of that was negotiable. The design strategy had to work within it.

My Role

I owned the design strategy, information architecture, and component architecture decisions. I directed two mid-level designers across the dashboard and transaction flows, setting direction, running critiques, and making scope calls when we were behind. Research synthesis and stakeholder readouts were mine. The PM owned the roadmap; I influenced it. The third designer handled mobile adaptation; I reviewed and aligned it but didn't execute it.

Research, What We Found and What We Cut

I had two strong signals and used them against each other. Product analytics told me where users dropped off; the support tickets told me why: the frustration, the confusion, the exact language customers used. I leaned on the eight-month ticket dataset for depth because it was large, longitudinal, and free of recruitment bias, but I used the analytics to confirm the tickets reflected the most common failures, not just the loudest customers. The two cross-checked each other, which is why I trusted the conclusion enough to scope the whole redesign around those two flows.

What the data showed was that customer confusion wasn't spread evenly across the platform. It clustered around two flows, fund transfers and account overview, and around the gap between what mobile and web promised. End customers weren't struggling with the full product. They were failing repeatedly in the same two places, then raising support tickets with their bank or abandoning the task entirely. At contract renewal, that accumulated friction became the bank's conversation with Qore.

The PM wanted to add bill payments and savings goals in the same sprint. I pushed back, not because those weren't valid problems, but because splitting three designers across five flows in 16 weeks was a reliable way to ship nothing well. We held the scope.

Information Architecture

The old navigation was a single long list: every feature surfaced at the same level, with no hierarchy and no primary path. The two flows customers used most, transfers and account overview, had no more prominence than features they touched once a year.

The redesign restructured the IA around those two flows, surfacing them as top-level entry points directly from the Home Screen. Average steps-to-task-completion dropped from 4.2 to 2.6 in testing.

Key Decisions

Sign In, the First Screen Every Bank Is Judged On

Because the platform is white-labelled, sign in is the first surface a bank's customers meet and the first place the bank's own credibility is on the line. It also carries a structural requirement no consumer banking app has: a customer belongs to a specific institution, so the flow has to establish which bank they are signing into before it can authenticate them at all.

I resolved that with an institution code field placed above the credentials rather than behind a bank picker, so the tenant is set in the same pass as the login without adding a screen. Account officers, who sign in against a different permission set, get a separate entry point below the primary action instead of a role toggle that every customer would have to read past. The left panel is a brandable slot: banks swap the imagery and mark, and the form column stays fixed so the layout stays predictable across deployments.

Results

Measured at 90 days post-launch against the prior 90-day period.

The results sit at two levels, and it's worth keeping them separate. The end-customer experience is the mechanism: task completion in the two highest-abandonment flows fell 37% (fund transfer A/B-tested against the prior design), CSAT rose from 3.1 to 4.7 out of 5 in post-session surveys, and mobile usage grew 42% after the mobile-first rebuild. These are the numbers I attribute most directly to the design. The business outcome is bank-client retention: annual bank-client churn fell from 17% to 14% within 90 days of launch (churn is measured as an annualised rate; the shift reflects the trailing rate at 90 days post-launch against the prior 90-day period). I'll be careful with that one: a bank's renewal turns on pricing, account management, and SLAs as well as product, so I won't claim the redesign alone moved it. What I can say is that end-customer experience was the retention lever Qore was betting on, and it's the part I was responsible for. The experience metrics are the mechanism; the churn number is the outcome they fed.

The churn and task completion numbers are the ones that mattered. Everything else, satisfaction scores, mobile usage, implementation speed, explains the mechanism. Bank staff could find what they needed faster, the mobile experience was now worth using, and the dashboard was surfacing what people actually needed to see. That's what moved retention.

What I'd Do Differently

The analytics that diagnosed the problem were solid. The gap was on the other end: the new behavioural tagging we designed for the redesigned flows wasn't captured consistently in the backend, so for the first weeks post-launch I was inferring how the new flows performed rather than seeing it cleanly. Earlier technical discovery, working sessions with engineering during the design phase, not just handoff reviews, would have caught it.

I'd also have pushed for more research with business account managers specifically. Our 25-person sample skewed toward personal banking operators. The dashboard logic for business accounts was largely intuition-driven; it worked, but it was a gap I'd close earlier next time.