A leading international bank partnered with 11:FS and a major consumer ecosystem to create a differentiated challenger banking proposition in one of the world’s most competitive credit markets - Singapore.
Together, we designed an experience centred on everyday spending, personalised rewards and shared household value-helping the bank move beyond traditional, rate-led competition.
Credit propositions have traditionally competed through interest rates, introductory offers and points-based rewards. In a crowded market, these features are increasingly difficult to differentiate and often fail to create a meaningful role in customers’ everyday lives.
We recognised an opportunity to take a different approach.
By connecting banking services with a broader consumer ecosystem, the proposition could offer value at the moments that mattered most: when customers shopped, managed household spending, worked towards savings goals or shared finances with family members.
The ambition was to build a challenger banking experience that could become part of customers’ daily routines - making spending more rewarding, savings more visible, and household money management more connected.
We were engaged to identify the customer needs that remained underserved by existing providers, define a differentiated proposition, and design the Minimum Lovable Product required to bring it to life.
The proposition was entering a mature and highly competitive market; customers already had access to an extensive range of cards, rewards programmes and promotional offers, making it difficult for a new entrant to stand out through conventional product features alone.
To succeed, the experience needed a clear and defensible reason for customers to engage with it.
The wider ecosystem of a retail company the bank was partnering with offered the opportunity to connect financial services with familiar shopping behaviours and established customer relationships. Determining how those advantages could be translated into a coherent banking proposition, rather than a collection of loosely connected benefits, was the next obstacle.
The experience also needed to work across different customer motivations. Some customers would be focused on maximising rewards, others would want greater visibility over their spending or help reaching a savings goal. Families needed ways to coordinate purchases and share value without sacrificing individual control.
Our role was to bring those needs together into a proposition that felt simple, relevant and distinct while ensuring the initial feature set remained focused enough to validate and deliver.
We brought together specialists across customer strategy, proposition design, product and experience design to define the opportunity and translate it into a tangible product experience.
We began by exploring the competitive landscape and identifying areas where existing credit and rewards propositions were failing to meet customers’ needs. This allowed us to move the conversation beyond product parity and focus on behaviours that could create a stronger, more frequent relationship with customers.
We then defined the proposition around three connected sources of value:
1. Making everyday spending work harder.
2. Helping customers see and understand the value they were receiving.
3. Supporting the way money is managed across a household.
Our work included:
The resulting experience introduced several connected features designed to make the proposition useful beyond the point of payment.
Together, these capabilities demonstrated how banking, shopping and rewards could work as one unified experience.
By combining banking with the wider consumer ecosystem, we helped the client establish a differentiated role for the product in customers’ daily lives. The proposition connected spending, savings and rewards in ways that were visible, useful and easy to understand.
The work gave the client a clear proposition and prioritised feature set from which to move forward. It created the foundation for a challenger banking experience built around personalised value and shared household spending, providing a credible way to compete in the Singapore market where traditional credit propositions have become increasingly difficult to distinguish.
