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Deutsche Bank

Accelerating German card commerce

Summary

Aim: Launch a payment challenger backed by a heritage brand to accelerate German card commerce.

Outcome: A merchant-centric brand and digital experience that meets the emerging needs of today’s merchants in Germany.

Consultancy: Class35, London
Role: Strategy | Brand strategy | UX strategy & design | Service design

Objective

Build a merchant-centric brand
Our small team of four consultants started the project with the objective of developing a merchant-centric brand identity, aligning and reflecting the needs and expectations of German SMEs.

Our approach was structured as follows:

1. Review the bank’s go-to-market strategy to understand the essence of the proposition.

2. Review of the German card commerce market (and the wider European market) to understand the overarching eco-system and how financial brands are positioning themselves. We mainly used desk research, trawling digital platforms, financial forums, and product comparison engines.

3. Facilitation of qualitative research with German merchants across industries. We spoke to approx. 10 merchants during 1-2-1 interviews discussed their opinions and views about finance providers, their business needs, aspirations and plans for the future, barriers, and apprehensions towards card commerce. 

4. Based on the above outputs, we then ran a number of fast-paced ideation sessions, pulling together an initial list of potential brand names and initial directions for the brand identity. These were tested with merchants during further 1-2-1 sessions.

5. A final number of concepts was presented back to the client and the brand name VERT was chosen.

6. Another round of merchant testing helped us understand the potential of each brand identity concept, resulting in a lead concept which further guided our approach to web UI and copywriting.

Building the experience
We were working with ambitious sprint timelines, needing to launch in October 2022. To do so, we had to understand the bank’s ecosystem of suppliers, touch-points of existing journeys at the bank, as well as legacy constraints and technical complexities, and plan delivery sprints.

1. We blueprinted the ‘to be’ service delivery across the customer lifecycle and liaised with key partners to understand the feasibility and viability of our plans. Where necessary, we proposed workarounds if an existing legacy prevented us from providing a less-than-ideal merchant experience.

2. We identified key journeys to be mapped as part of the UX strategy – this included the purchase journey, intersections with the bank’s main site, journeys with personalised content for merchants of key industries, as well as filter functionalities guiding merchants to the right POS system for their needs. We facilitated stakeholder sprint sessions, deciding on the most crucial items and generating a backlog for scale.

3. We tested the initial journeys and set about to design the end-to-end experience ready for launch. Our outputs included the Vert website, design assets for launch (e.g. key print materials), a light-touch brand guide, and a backlog of future content.

Outcome

Vert launched in October 2022 and is the only German provider to combine payment acceptance and processing and traditional banking solutions, meeting market demand for an integrated offering and streamlining access to innovative products for merchants of all sizes.

fintechtimes.com, 13 October 2022