IKEA’s Bank: Their Reality vs My Vision

I was reading a fascinating case study about Ikano Bank, which is the bank of IKEA. The bank is headquartered in Malmö, Sweden, serves customers across Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, the UK, Poland, Germany and Austria, offering savings and loan products for consumers, sales support services for retailers, and leasing and factoring solutions for businesses.

The bank claims it looks after 2 million customers with 1,100 employees but, thanks to digital transformation, is changing the game rapidly with robots as the bank has been actively automating many tedious processes and saving thousands of hours of work over the past few years. In fact the bank claims that, just in one year, they saved staff over 100,000 hours of work through automation.

A good example is name changes on customer accounts. The software robots tackled a backlog exceeding 30,000 records requiring name changes in the core banking system, work that had been estimated to require hiring ten employees for hundreds of days. The robot completed the task in weeks.

This is just one of fifteen low-hanging fruit processes the bank focused upon, which were built in just six months.

Sounds all great?

The thing is that I cannot get out of my mind a bank created by IKEA.

You enter the branch and there is a long hallway with a ceiling of fluorescent lights. Once you enter, you find yourself in a maze of corridors. You walk around and start wondering where the windows are? How do I get out of here? Are those meatballs?

After walking around in a world of darkness for what seems like hours, you finally see a hint of natural daylight. Is that the outside? Can I escape this place? Please release me, let me go!

You run to the light and finally have some fresh air. It’s the real world again. Then you spend an hour trying to find your car in the massive car park and drive home.

Is this the Ikano Bank experience?

In fact, thinking about it, imagine logging into Ikano Bank. You start with a nice and simple screen, showing your bank balance and offering payments, savings, loans and investment options. Before you know it, you are going around in circles and can find no way to log out. You are locked in.

Apologies to the great guys at IKEA and Ikano for writing this, but I do find your product design a little bit claustrophobic in the real world. I hope it is not the same in the digital world.

 

This case study is inspired by QA Financial