In an era where agile startups dominate the innovation narrative, how does a 300,000-employee banking behemoth stay nimble enough to deliver customer-centric digital experiences? At UXDX USA, Sonali Divilek, Head of Digital at Chase, pulled back the curtain on precisely this challenge, revealing strategies that balance the seemingly contradictory forces of enterprise scale and customer-focused experimentation.

"Our job is to power the digital platform that gets customers to their full financial potential and helps their dreams come true," explained Divilek, whose team builds the features and experiences for Chase's mobile app and website – the front door to daily interactions for millions of customers.

The scale at which Chase operates is staggering: 80 million customers, 6 million small businesses, 4,800 branches nationwide, and 68 million customers engaging with their digital platforms. This translates to 12 million unique app users every 12 hours and 15 billion login sessions annually. These aren't just impressive numbers – they represent the massive responsibility Divilek's team shoulders as custodians of people's financial lives.

The Quad: Breaking Down Organizational Silos

At the heart of Chase's approach to product development is what Divilek calls "the quad" – a cross-functional structure that brings together product, design, technology, and data analytics teams from the outset of any initiative. Unlike traditional siloed approaches where teams work sequentially, Chase's quad model ensures diverse perspectives tackle problems holistically from day one.

"We're not really working in silos and working sequentially," Divilek emphasized. "We're really coming together and saying, what is the crux of the problem? How do we solve it? What should we build and how should we build it?"

This integrated structure creates a powerful dynamic where each discipline contributes unique value:

• Engineers think platform-first, determining how to build solutions
• Designers focus on end-to-end customer experience and emotional impact
• Data analysts instrument products to gather insights from customer interactions
• Product managers orchestrate the team, "like a band leader trying to get the whole group to play the same song"

The quad approach ensures teams remain deeply curious about customer problems rather than becoming enamored with their own solutions. This curiosity manifests through call listening, customer research, focus groups, and continuous product iteration.

Experimentation Culture: Embracing Failure as Learning

Perhaps most surprising in a conservative industry like banking is Chase's embrace of experimentation and failure as essential components of innovation. As Divilek explains, the expectation is that a third of experiments will win, a third will be flat, and a third will fail – with counterintuitive outcomes expected.

This culture of experimentation extends beyond just product features to engineering practices. Chase employs "True CD" (continuous delivery) where technology teams write unit tests for their code and conduct contract testing with other tech teams to ensure seamless integration. This approach helps de-risk deployments by breaking down problems and verifying end-to-end functionality.

To illustrate this experimentation mindset, Divilek shared a revealing case study about declining mobile app account production in 2022. The team discovered their "Open an Account" button was confusing customers, who perceived it as limited to checking accounts or credit cards rather than Chase's full product range.

After testing multiple variants like "Open a New Account," "Shop Products," and "Explore More with Chase," they uncovered surprising insights:

• "Open a New Account" performed poorly with new customers who thought, "I just opened an account, why would I need another one?"
• Terms like "products" confused users who didn't conceptualize banking services as products

The winning solution was a visual product lineup that clearly displayed Chase's offerings, resulting in a 13% increase in account production – a massive win given Chase's scale. Yet even this success was temporary, as Divilek noted they've already iterated further on the design since then.

"These small, incremental 'game of inches' changes can drive huge ROI and huge results," she explained.

From Customer Problems to Innovative Solutions

Another compelling example of Chase's customer-centric approach was the development of their "Score Planner" credit tool. While their existing Credit Journey tool provided credit monitoring, customer feedback revealed a critical gap: people understood their credit scores but didn't know how to improve them.

Market research showed competing tools offered only generic advice based on either "people like you" (same score) or "people like them" (target score). None provided personalized, actionable guidance.

Chase's solution, Score Planner, allows customers to see their current score, set improvement goals tied to specific objectives like buying a house, and receive a customized plan with clear timeframes. The impact has been remarkable: 3.5 million plans created, over a million customers completing their plans, and an average improvement of 30+ points per customer.

Leadership's Role in Fostering Innovation

Divilek emphasized that for experimentation to thrive, cultural change must start from the top. She credited CEO Jamie Dimon's leadership in establishing a data-driven approach that values learning from failure:

"It's about the data. It's about the facts. You got to do the analysis, rinse and repeat," she quoted Dimon as saying. "You have to appreciate that failure is a normal outcome and something you're going to learn from."

Key Takeaways for Organizations of Any Size

Divilek concluded with four principles that drive Chase's customer-centric transformation:

1. Know your why: Stay focused on the core problem you're solving rather than getting distracted by solutions
2. Measure outcomes, not output: Success is about moving the needle for customers, not just shipping features
3. Constantly experiment: Continuous testing improves ROI and customer satisfaction
4. Embrace iteration: Product development is "a living and breathing thing" that requires ongoing refinement

What's particularly noteworthy about Chase's approach is how it demonstrates that even massive enterprises can adopt practices typically associated with startups – rapid experimentation, cross-functional teams, and iterative development. The differentiator is Chase's ability to execute these approaches at tremendous scale while maintaining the governance required in financial services.

As digital transformation reshapes every industry, Divilek's insights offer a valuable blueprint for organizations seeking to balance customer-centricity with operational scale. The lesson is clear: success lies not in perfect solutions but in creating systems that enable continuous learning and customer-focused evolution.

Watch Sonali Divilek's full talk on Driving Customer-Centric Transformation in Banking: https://uxdx.com/session/driving-customer-centric-transformation-in-banking/

Or download our post show report with all talks at UXDX USA 2024: https://uxdx.com/post-show-report/