Interbank Digital Sales Platform

CONTEXT

Interbank is one of Peru's four largest retail banks, serving over two million customers nationwide. Around 2018, the company faced the challenge of launching its first fully digital sales journeys for its main products: digital accounts, credit cards and loans. Its closest competitor had already released a digital account acquisition form, but the customer experience was poor. There was an opportunity to take the lead.

PROBLEM

Interbank already had a team shipping the first prototypes of the digital account product on the main website, but sales were scarce and there was considerable internal debate about the pace of production releases. Three separate commercial teams created their own APIs and handled their own front-end experience. Different journeys, different code, different bugs. Results and learnings were not actively shared. After some months of experimenting, the VP Retail office decided that digital sales needed to scale fast to avoid losing competitive advantage. As Product Owner of Interbank.pe, I was given the task.

SOLUTION

• Embracing the technical challenge. I worked closely with the engineering team to scope the project and design a modular architecture that would let us deliver value as fast as possible. We identified that several steps repeated across journeys — authentication, personal data, confirmation — and ran on the same backend API services, so we reused them to accelerate delivery.
• Building a consistent experience. The journeys themselves were designed by an external agency. I set up a team routine that brought the agency into weekly sessions, so we could argue through the best experience to offer our customers rather than receive a finished design and implement it.
• Scaling growth from day zero. Every release was tracked and its metrics analysed from day zero. I assembled a cross-functional committee where the commercial, engineering, data and design teams were confronted with the latest numbers and asked to propose improvements to the journeys.

OUTCOMES

• 6x growth in digital account sales share, with monthly originations going from a few hundred to tens of thousands after one year.
• 10 fully digital journeys released in 12 months. Beyond the digital account, the same way of working was applied in parallel to the other products.
• 1 design system for the digital sales experience. Centralising ownership of the digital sales journeys translated into a consistent journey and customer trust.