Bendigo Bank · e-banking security migration
A Million Customers, Moved.
Retiring a bank's e-token for over a million people, without a maintenance window long enough to do it quietly.
Role: CX Journey Lead · Bendigo and Adelaide Bank · Aug – Dec 2022
The situation
You can't pause a bank.
Bendigo was retiring its old e-banking security, the Symantec VIP Access e-token, and folding authentication into the app itself: a password and a four-digit PIN. Cleaner, safer, one less thing to carry.
But every customer had to move: rural customers who bank on a desktop once a fortnight, sole traders who live in the app, complex business owners with a stack of logins and no patience. All of them, off the old system and onto the new one, without a single person losing access to their own money. And releases had to line up across two banks' design teams: Bendigo's, and Up's, the neobank Ferocia builds.
The strategy
Segment before you touch anyone.
Migration isn't one journey. Twelve segments, from 3,000 people to 343,000. Size set the stakes; behaviour set the method. Nobody moved until we knew which group they were in and what moving would cost them.
The method
How hard to push, and on whom.
Every segment got read through three lenses and sorted into one of three intensities. Behaviour decided the lane.
The ask
Three sentences to move a million people.
The whole strategy came down to one moment on a phone: plain language, one clear action, and an escape hatch that vanished for the forced lane.
The craft
One segment, end to end.
Here's the full journey for a single segment (App + Physical Token users, 22,000 of them) from log in to the point of no return and out the other side.
Scrolls sideways →
The reality
Building it while they moved.
The product was still being built while customers were moving. Some features could ship during migration; a few had to land before a segment could go. Business customers, for one, couldn't move until the profile switcher existed.
The outcome
What it produced.
Twelve segmented CX journey maps. Over a million customers moved. Two banks' design teams kept in step. Scope management up 50%. Project success rates doubled.
You can't pause a bank. So you learn to change the wheels while it's still driving.
Still here? You're my kind of reader. There's more below.