Digital banking without losing the relationship: a pilot for Judo’s lending customers

Judo Bank · Lead Product Designer

Situation

Judo Bank launched in 2016 as Australia's first challenger bank purpose-built for small and medium enterprises. Its core value proposition is relationship-led banking — banking professionals deeply understanding a customer's business before offering financial products. In that model, technology is an enabler, not the driver. As a business in its scale-up phase, that meant a lot of manual process sitting behind the current relationship-led experience.

Complication

Customers relied on human interaction to access even basic transactional and financial information. That meant Judo bankers and support staff were spending significant time on low-value administrative tasks — time that came directly at the cost of the relationship-led service the whole business model depended on.

The business needed three things simultaneously, and they pulled in different directions:

  • Address the top trivial tasks costing lending customers and Judo staff the most time
  • Build a digital experience that complemented, not competed with, the banker-led relationship
  • Build something scalable — a platform Judo could keep building digital capability on, not a one-off

All of this had to happen inside real constraints: a multi-vendor team (internal subject matter experts, agile coaches, product owners, legal and financial product managers, plus an external vendor's solutions architects, developers, and scrum master); a CORE banking system mid-migration to a modern platform; customer data sitting in a CRM adapted from a small-scale non-banking operation; an outdated UI component library from the vendor; and full banking-grade compliance requirements — accessibility, privacy, security, anti-money laundering, and more.

Question

How do you design a digital banking experience that measurably reduces manual admin load — without undermining the relationship-led model the business is actually built on, and without a stable technical foundation to build it on?

Answer

Approach:

  • Started with active listening to understand the actual lay of the land before proposing direction
  • Identified high-impact, low-effort areas to build early momentum
  • Identified where the team had genuine ambiguity or contention, and built plans specifically to create confidence there
  • Visualised work publicly throughout, rather than working in isolation
  • Negotiated expectations and adapted to the existing ways of working rather than imposing new process
  • Audited the vendor's design system (built on Backbase) to shape a Judo-specific design language that could scale
  • Partnered with the Product Owner to build an outcome-driven, customer-centric roadmap using the Kano Model and RICE prioritisation frameworks
  • Worked directly inside delivery squads to execute the pilot program
  • Supported marketing and content review for the App Store release
  • Ran multiple rounds of internal dogfooding before release

Design output against each business need:

Reducing the top trivial tasks costing staff time — mapped the customer journey from acquisition through to application to identify where roadmap prioritisation would have the most leverage.

A digital experience that complemented the relationship model — rather than digitising the entire banking relationship, translated specific "relationship moments" into digital equivalents, preserving what made the banker-led model valuable while removing the administrative drag around it.

A scalable platform — built a platform-agnostic, accessibility-compliant design language intended to support future product offerings, not just the pilot's immediate scope.

Other problems solved along the way: Redirecting users correctly given the underlying technology architecture constraints required a dedicated user flow, since the CORE banking migration and multiple middle-layer systems meant a single customer action could need to route through several different platforms depending on state.

Outcome

The pilot shipped as Judo's first digital banking product — mobile and desktop — with measurable positive feedback from both the internal team and early customer adopters. The work was produced and led solely by me, with collaboration and feedback from the Head of Design, a fellow Lead Product Designer, and a contractor responsible for adapting the Backbase Design System into Judo's brand theme.

Note: the original case study includes several diagrams — a business context map, the digital experience opportunity map, team/technology constraints diagram, the design process outline, the acquisition-to-application journey map, the relationship-to-digital translation model, the scalable design language framework, the redirection user flow, and team/customer feedback screenshots. These should be extracted and re-added as images alongside this page once available.