The ask
NatWest brought in Publicis Sapient to reimagine their mobile banking app around what customers needed. I led design and research, working alongside NatWest’s in-house Human Centred Design team.
The research
Participants
Qualitative interviews across 4 rounds
In comparative testing, old design vs new
Included fraud and scam victims and reluctant digital adopters, not just NatWest's most engaged users
What I designed
Onboarding
First-run experience redesigned around trust
Insights
Spending moved from a plain transaction list to a breakdown people could act on
Payments
One unified pattern across transfers, bills and cards, with biometric authentication and scam alerts built in
Key moments
Location-aware theming, personalised shortcuts, savings goals, a short financial literacy quiz
The constraint
Legacy architecture meant small UI changes carried disproportionate build effort, and personalisation depended on third-party data providers outside the mobile team’s control. Rather than leave that as a footnote, I turned it into the deliverable: a quick wins list and a mid-2020 to end-2020 backlog, so the vision handed over as something buildable in stages.
The takeaway
Research-led design leadership in a regulated environment, where every payment flow carries compliance implications (SCA, PSD2). The vision was ambitious, so the work was shaping it into a roadmap the team could build against.