When Customers Outgrow Their Bank

Qik was created to make banking simpler and more accessible. For many customers, it became the bank they needed when they were beginning to build their financial lives.

But as our customers grew, something important began to change. Their expectations, priorities, and financial needs were growing too.

One customer expressed it in a way that stayed with us: “Qik was the bank I needed when I was starting out. But now, I need more.”

That insight became the foundation for Qik Pro.

The opportunity was bigger than a premium card

The traditional banking response to an affluent customer is often predictable: take the existing experience, add a premium credit card, attach a set of benefits, and change the visual treatment.

We saw an opportunity to do something more meaningful.

Our customers weren’t simply asking for a more exclusive card. They wanted a bank that could keep up with their lives—a bank that understood how their needs had evolved and could offer greater value, flexibility, and attention across their entire financial relationship.

So we asked a different question:

What if becoming a Pro customer changed your entire banking experience, not just the card in your wallet?

That shift in perspective helped us define Qik Pro not as a product, but as an ecosystem.

The card became the key; not the destination

The Qik Pro credit card serves as the entry point into the experience, but its value extends across every Qik product a customer uses.

Becoming Pro unlocks personalized cashback, stronger returns on accounts and certificates, preferential loan rates, travel benefits, and access to more personalized service. The goal was to make the relationship feel connected: every product should become more valuable when it becomes part of the Pro ecosystem.

This required us to think beyond individual product teams and journeys. We had to consider how the account, card, loans, certificates, customer service, partnerships, and app experience could work together as one proposition.

That was one of the most important strategic shifts behind Qik Pro. Instead of designing a collection of premium benefits, we designed a new relationship between the customer and the bank.

Designing around people’s lives

Financial products are usually organized around the way banks operate: cards, accounts, loans, investments, and service.

Customers don’t experience life that way.

They think about what they are trying to accomplish: taking a trip, buying a home, building a business, caring for their family, or enjoying more of what they have worked for.

This led me to introduce a new experience concept inside the bank: Pro Routines.

Pro Routines are connected, end-to-end experiences built around a customer’s interests and real-life moments. Rather than waiting for someone to search through a list of unrelated benefits, the bank recognizes what they may be trying to do and brings the most useful services together at the right time.

Travel became our first expression of the idea.

When a customer purchases an airline ticket with their Qik Pro card, that transaction can become the beginning of a broader experience. We can ask about the upcoming trip and help the customer prepare for it—from relevant offers at barbershops or salons before departure to arranging the airport’s premium Before Boarding experience.

As the trip approaches, Qik Pro can surface destination ideas and provide access to relevant benefits for hotels, transportation, restaurants, and travel services. What begins as a card transaction becomes a coordinated journey before, during, and after the trip.

The innovation is not any single discount or feature. It is the way those moments connect.

With additional Pro Routines planned around other areas of interest, the concept creates a foundation for Qik Pro to become increasingly personal and responsive over time.

Growing the team’s influence

Qik Pro also represented an important step forward for the design organization.

The team was involved from the earliest stages of defining the opportunity, not just after the business had selected a solution. Together, we listened to customers, challenged the assumptions behind traditional premium banking, shaped the proposition, tested ideas, and refined how the ecosystem should work.

The work brought together product design, experience design, research, graphic design, brand, content, service, and technology. Every discipline contributed to a different part of the same experience, from the logic inside the app to the physical card, communications, partnerships, service model, and launch.

My role was to create the clarity and conditions that allowed those disciplines to work as one team. I helped frame the problem, align the organization around a shared vision, raise the ambition of the solution, and ensure that the customer experience remained coherent as more teams became involved.

For many team members, this was an opportunity to move beyond executing individual screens or deliverables. They became active participants in defining the product, influencing business decisions, testing the proposition with customers, and shaping how Qik Pro would enter the market.

We carried that thinking through to the launch event itself. It wasn’t treated as a separate marketing moment, but as another part of the experience—an opportunity to express what being “Pro” meant and introduce the ecosystem with the same intention we brought to the product.

Watching the team expand its confidence, range, and influence was one of the most meaningful outcomes of the project. Qik Pro demonstrated what becomes possible when design is involved not only in how a product looks, but in deciding what the business should build and why.

A bank designed to grow with its customers

Qik Pro helped us move beyond the conventional idea of premium banking.

It created a connected ecosystem in which the credit card acts as a key to greater value across accounts, certificates, loans, service, and everyday experiences. More importantly, it gave us a platform for designing around people’s changing lives rather than around isolated banking products.

We didn’t set out to place a premium card in the hands of more affluent customers. We set out to build a bank that could continue growing alongside them.