Not a single feature test, but a full audit of how people aged 18-45 actually experience digital banking — from the landing page to a home loan approval — benchmarked against what they already loved in apps like Spotify and Instagram.
Kotak Mahindra Bank needed a pan-India understanding of digital banking customers aged 18-45 — their interactions, needs, pain points, and present-day expectations from a digital banking portal. The brief wasn't to fix a known problem; it was to build a comprehensive enough picture that the bank could decide what to fix.
We ran a mix of qualitative techniques — 40+ Triads, 15+ Focus Group Discussions, and 30+ Depth Interviews — deliberately spanning both urban and rural India, because digital banking expectations don't look the same across those contexts. Alongside this, we conducted long, structured reviews of Kotak's own portal and its key competitors' portals.
One of the more distinctive parts of this study: we asked users what they loved about the best digital products in their lives — Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, YouTube — and catalogued the specific features that excited them. That list became a deliberate source of inspiration for improving Kotak's own website and app journeys, rather than only benchmarking against other banks.
The findings gave Kotak a comprehensive, evidence-based foundation for the digital revamp of its online product journeys — grounded in what users actually did, not what the bank assumed they wanted.