Delivering a new standard in banking for one of Australia's largest financial institutions
National Australia Bank (NAB) is a financial services organisation with over 12,100,000 customers and 50,000 people, operating more than 1,750 stores and Business Banking Centres globally. NAB's major financial services franchises in Australia are complemented by businesses in New Zealand, Asia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
With over 4.5 million retail and small business customers in NAB's Personal Banking division alone, NAB was looking for a solution to develop a significant refreshed retail branch experience. In partnership with Warren and Mahoney, DNA was successful in a competitive pitch to deliver this work.
The resulting programme has been an ongoing process for over a year and started with the tactical design of stores already in planning and construction. These 'in-flight' stores not only allowed the design team to rapidly engage with the client, their customers and the challenges of the project – it also allowed us to trial concepts and prototypes in real-life bank environments.
The new design programme was looking to do two things: foster a better dialogue between customers and staff without affecting the performance of the branch in delivering transactional services and create an environment that was more dynamic and inspiring. Importantly, the new design could not be a one-off concept or ‘showroom’ – the new design standard had to be able to be rolled into business-as-usual refits immediately.
The culmination of the design process was the opening of the first store in the Docklands area of Melbourne recently.
Although it's early days – the customer and staff response has been overwhelmingly positive – with early usability surveys averaging a 9 out of 10 across the board.
The design has been approved for roll-out and five more stores are in various stages of construction. At the same time key elements of the design are being retrofitted through the NAB network in a store refresh program for those locations that will not get a refit in the near future.
