Swedbank's small steps

Market leaders still have to move

Swedbank is the largest bank in the Baltic region. A comfortable position, provided nobody becomes comfortable.

Competition for business customers was intensifying and expectations were changing. The bank needed to strengthen its relevance without mistaking size for immunity.

The first visible move was almost comically small: removing transaction fees measured in cents.

Small money. Significant friction.

The sums were negligible. Their effect was not. Our research showed that these little charges influenced customer behaviour and coloured perceptions of the bank’s overall value and quality.

Removing them made life fractionally easier for customers and signalled something much larger: the bank was willing to reconsider familiar practices from the customer’s side of the counter.

A few cents became the first visible step towards a more user-centred organisation.

“Business customer” is not a personality type

One-to-one interviews and focus groups helped us map the journeys of target customer segments. What looked like a homogeneous audience from inside the bank turned out to contain very different needs, behaviours and expectations.

This gave Swedbank a sharper basis for deciding where change would matter—rather than treating every business with a registration number as the same business.

Teach a bank to design

Close collaboration with Swedbank’s pan-Baltic teams was central to the work. We trained and equipped them to use innovation and user-centred design independently, embedding the methods rather than leaving behind an impressive presentation and our phone number.

Much of that progress is invisible from the outside. It lives in better decisions, stronger internal capability and a habit of continuous improvement. For a very large bank, that is how small steps keep adding up.

Kudos to Not Perfect for giving the first small victory its public voice.