BMO Alto

Designing BMO’s first online-only banking platform

Client
BMO

Year
2023

  • Information Architecture

  • UX Design

  • Visual Design

  • Coordinating with the Content Strategist and Product Owner

  • Performing designs reviews on the page post-development

Responsibilities

Jump to

“How might we educate rate-seekers about BMO Alto’s online-only, high-rate deposit accounts and convince them to sign-up?”

Problem Statement

As Alto was a completely new site and the main BMO brand had low brand recognition among American customers, the content strategist and I wanted to keep things simple and focus on educating customers about BMO Alto and the features of its 2 deposit accounts.

I developed a sitemap to visualize the scope and help me work through the gaps in my understanding such as:

  • Should each CD term be treated like a separate product?

  • Should there be a standalone FAQ page in-addition to the page-level FAQs?

To identify the best design patterns to reuse and serve our target audience, I performed a competitor analysis of 10 US banks

Discovery

Some of the top patterns I identified and later used in the wireframes were:

  • Using calculators to help customers understand product benefits and increase the stickiness of the product pages. This was also confirmed by past reports done by the user research team

  • Comparison to competitors as well as the national average for rates

  • Product rates are shown above the fold

  • Using sticky navigation so the primary CTA is always within view for users

I met with the brand governance team to align on a visual design that would appeal to tech-savvy prospects while addressing stakeholder feedback.

Contraints

I was restricted to using the Alto branding developed by a vendor before my involvement with the project. This branding was developed to communicate that Alto was a discount brand, offering leaner high-rate products with reduced services compared to the main BMO brand.

It uses light blue as the primary accent colour, a contrast to the parent brand's traditional, trustworthy deep blue to further highlight its status as a sub-brand using a simple colour palette.

For my first round of designs, I followed the brand guidelines but received less than stellar feedback from stakeholders.

Their main critique was that the pale blue made the page didn’t feel ‘edgy’ enough for the target demo. I decided to use a dark blue gradient, normally reserved for premium products and pages on the main brand. I wanted to give a sleeker feeling to the Alto site to distinguish it from the parent brand, making it more appealing to tech-savvy prospects and satisfying stakeholder feedback.

I met with the brand team to understand how far we could deviate from the lighter branding in the Alto brand guidelines. Unfortunately, because the leadership had already approved the guidelines, the brand governance team was firm about adhering to them.

Refining the designs and sharing my recommendations with stakeholders

Facilitation

After realizing there was a disconnect between the two stakeholders groups from Product and Marketing, I decided to have smaller meetings to understand their goals and combine their feedback to pinpoint the common ground between them. This strategy helped me have more in-depth conversations with partners and control the direction of the design.

Visual Design

Playing around with content hierarchy, components and brand colours

From my smaller meetings with stakeholders, I realized it would be better to highlight rate and main product features in the hero section above the fold to draw prospects in. For the product cards I decided on horizontal cards in the end, as partners wanted to discourage direct comparison between products and instead encourage users to potentially sign up for both products.

Due to constraints with the application of the secure experience, we were unable to offer one primary CTA button for customers to open either account in the same journey. Instead I added the CTAs to the individual product cards on the design.

Additionally, as there was no longer a primary CTA the sticky nav no longer made sense. I also removed the steps to open from the homepage since it was slightly different from each product and I replaced it instead with a section to highlight some of Alto’s digital capabilities.

Launched in April 2023, within 3 months Alto had $1 billion in deposits from customers all over the US, with the majority being in California. Similar product pages on BMO.com take about 18 months to reach that amount

Outcome