Banks urged to treat user experience governance like risk control

Banks that keep funding large app redesigns may be addressing visible symptoms rather than the structural causes of weak digital adoption, according to Alex Kreger, founder and chief executive of UXDA Financial UX Agency. Kreger argues that financial institutions should manage user experience through standing governance mechanisms, comparable in authority to risk controls, instead of treating UX as a sequence of delivery projects.

Kreger cited the case of an unnamed chief digital officer at one of Europe’s largest retail banks who had reviewed a third broad UX redesign in 11 years, with digital adoption showing little movement. He used the example to argue that repeated redesigns can become a costly cycle if banks lack a system for preserving design decisions, standards and customer trust across products and channels.

Project model under scrutiny

In Kreger’s analysis, the dominant banking approach treats UX as a linear procurement exercise: define a problem, appoint a team or vendor, produce screens or prototypes, launch the product and close the engagement. He said UXDA’s audits of hundreds of financial institutions across four continents suggest that this model often leaves banks with design artifacts but little lasting institutional capability.

The mechanism, as Kreger describes it, is a form of organizational memory loss. A new project team may reinterpret components, introduce patterns that conflict with earlier work, or solve a local product issue without regard to the broader digital system. Those decisions may not cause an immediate failure, but they can raise friction for customers and make later integration more expensive.

Kreger connects the problem to systems theory, citing Donella Meadows’ work on complex systems and Peter Senge’s concept of “fixes that fail.” In that framing, a redesign can temporarily improve a visible problem while reinforcing the process that caused the problem to return.

Coherence as an operating asset

UXDA’s proposed governance framework treats “coherence” as a bank asset that can be monitored and depleted. Kreger defines it as the alignment between what customers expect, what a bank’s digital service communicates and what the interface delivers across touchpoints over time.

The framework breaks experience health into five areas:

• Adoption, measuring how effectively digital services turn customer intent into completed action.
• Advantage, assessing whether the experience creates differentiation or only matches peers.
• Brand, tracking consistency in customer perception across channels.
• Alignment, measuring whether internal teams work toward the same experience goals.
• Trust, assessing whether the digital environment signals reliability and safety to customers.

Kreger said many institutions lack executive-level instruments for these measures, even as they monitor their balance sheets with precision. He argues that banks should track leading indicators such as design consistency ratios, decision latency and component reuse rates. According to UXDA, those signals can precede lagging outcomes such as lower adoption, churn and trust erosion by 12 to 36 months.

Risk-style authority for experience decisions

The organizational gap, in Kreger’s view, is not mainly a shortage of designers or technology. It is the absence of authority. Product, technology, compliance, operations, marketing and distribution teams all shape customer experience, but each may optimize for its own targets. Without binding decision rights, local choices can add up to a fragmented system.

Kreger proposes a digital experience governance office with defined authority, escalation routes and accountability for coherence across product lines and departments. He compares this to the role of a risk function, which can constrain business-unit decisions when they create exposure for the wider institution.

The argument implies a shift in bank budgeting and procurement. Instead of buying a completed redesign as a finite output, Kreger says institutions should invest in a maintained capability: standards, decision structures, measurement and governance that continue after a vendor engagement ends.

This story draws on original reporting from Finextra Research.