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

TL;DR

• What we achieved: Judo's first digital banking product, on mobile and desktop, with positive feedback from the internal team and early customers.
• How I went about it: Listened first, found high-impact, low-effort wins, and turned key "relationship moments" into digital ones instead of digitising everything.
• The opportunity: Cut the admin load on bankers without undermining the relationship-led model, and without a stable technical foundation.
• What needed attention: Customers needed a banker for even basic information, which took bankers away from the relationships the business depends on.
• The business: Judo Bank, Australia's first challenger bank built for small and medium businesses, where technology supports the relationship rather than replacing it.

A bit about the business

Judo Bank launched in 2016 as Australia's first challenger bank built for small and medium businesses. Its value proposition is relationship-led banking: bankers 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 relationship-led experience.

What worked and what needed attention

Customers relied on people for even basic transactional and financial information. So Judo bankers and support staff spent a lot of time on low-value admin, and that time came straight out of the relationship-led service the whole business model depends on.

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

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

All of this had to happen within real constraints:

• A multi-vendor team: internal subject matter experts, agile coaches, product owners, and legal and financial product managers, plus an external vendor's solutions architects, developers and scrum master
• A CORE banking system in the middle of migrating to a modern platform
• Customer data in a CRM adapted from a small-scale, non-banking operation
• An outdated UI component library from the vendor
• Full banking-grade compliance: accessibility, privacy, security, anti-money laundering and more

Key opportunities

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

How I went about it

Approach:

• Started by actively listening, to understand the lay of the land before proposing a direction
• Found high-impact, low-effort areas to build early momentum
• Found where the team had genuine ambiguity or disagreement, and made plans specifically to build confidence there
• Made the work visible throughout, instead of working in isolation
• Negotiated expectations and adapted to the existing ways of working, instead of 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 on an outcome-driven, customer-centred roadmap using the Kano Model and RICE prioritisation
• Worked directly inside delivery squads to run the pilot program
• Supported marketing and content review for the App Store release
• Ran several rounds of internal dogfooding before release

What I designed for each business need:

Cutting the top trivial tasks costing staff time. I mapped the customer journey from acquisition through to application, to find where roadmap prioritisation would have the most leverage.

A digital experience that complemented the relationship. Instead of digitising the whole banking relationship, I turned specific "relationship moments" into digital equivalents. That kept what made the banker-led model valuable, while removing the admin drag around it.

A scalable platform. I built a platform-agnostic, accessibility-compliant design language to support future products, not just the pilot.

Other problems solved along the way: Getting users to the right place needed its own user flow. With the CORE banking migration and several middle-layer systems, a single customer action could route through different platforms depending on its state.

What we achieved

The pilot shipped as Judo's first digital banking product, on mobile and desktop, with positive feedback from both the internal team and early customers.

I produced and led the work on my own, with collaboration and feedback from the Head of Design, a fellow Lead Product Designer, and a contractor who adapted the Backbase Design System to Judo's brand.