A rich customer experience for Barclays Africa Group

This weekend saw the launch of a new, customer-focused retail site for Absa, one of South Africa’s biggest banks, and a member of Barclays Africa Group.  

Built on Adobe Experience Manager 6.1, this new platform for the bank represents a landmark in their journey to becoming a design and data driven business.  Absa want to enable their customers  to manage their finances easier, faster and in whatever way suits them.  They know that in order to achieve this, they need to empower the marketing teams in the bank to create new, rich and responsive customer experiences.  For the last 6 months, we’ve been working in close collaboration with them to bring these ambitions to life.

A customised journey

Customers entering the site are now greeted with clear, simple graphics and a customised message that recognises their location and the time of day.  From there, they are guided to the information that they are seeking by a series of simple questions that aim to provide them with answers in as little time as possible.

A brand new author experience

Central to this new customer experience is a new authoring platform created using our own industry-leading site accelerator, Zen Garden.  By applying Atomic Design principles, we’ve provided Absa’s publishing team with the capability to quickly publish new product information, campaigns and microsites without having to rely on software development.  In fact, we have worked so closely with Absa throughout the 6 month development period that they are well on their way to operating the platform self-sufficiently.  A huge step in their ambitions to become design and data driven.  

Successful collaboration

Absa is already being hailed as innovative in the global fintech market with their first to market Apple Watch Banking App and ChatBanking on Twitter in South Africa.  But the biggest, and by far the most complex project in Absa’s digital evolution, has been the move to the cloud and the creation of this customer experience site; the destination that most people visit first for product and brand information.

Jacques Barkhuizen, Absa CIO, Digital and Distribution, has talked about the 6 month journey, “Collaborations such as the one with Cognifide are an excellent example of how we’re creating and leveraging relationships that will enable us to accelerate our digital transformation, deliver more, and create the kind of digital experiences that our customers deserve, faster and more effectively than we’ve ever done before.”

From our perspective it’s been a fantastic journey and one that’s enabled us to discover South Africa and establish Cognifide as a major player in the digital community there.  We’re looking forward to working with Absa as the platform evolves and to collaborating with Barclays Africa Group to roll out digital innovations across the continent.

Take a look at our case study to learn more about how this brand new customer experience was delivered in just 6 months.