Driving primacy for community banks and credit unions // Narmi
Product Design
2025
Overview
At Narmi, a white-labeled digital banking platform, we empower financial institutions (FIs) to offer seamless, modern digital experiences to their customers. Our clients, typically community banks and credit unions, rely on us to help improve customer engagement and retention across mobile and web platforms.
One of the biggest challenges our partner FIs face is ensuring users adopt key features after opening an account, like enrolling in direct deposit or setting up card controls, to create what’s known in the industry as account primacy. To address this, we designed and launched a customizable Onboarding Guides feature that helps drive these critical post-signup actions.
Team
Impact
The Problem
While new customers often sign up for a digital banking product with intent, they rarely complete the most important next steps, like setting up direct deposit, enabling push notifications, or adding their card to Apple/Google Pay. Users were opening up their accounts to a $0 balance and no next steps. FIs told us this drop-off was harming account engagement and reducing the long-term value of each new user.
How might we help new users build a habit with their digital bank by guiding them through high-value actions after account creation?
Partner collaboration
Because Narmi is a white-labeled platform, each FI we work with has slightly different goals and user types. We began by interviewing 6 key partner banks to understand what “primacy” looked like to them. Common themes included:
Direct deposit setup
Digital wallet activation
Configuring alert settings
Enrolling in rewards or card offers
We synthesized these inputs into a shared set of onboarding milestones and prioritized the most impactful based on both FI feedback and existing analytics data.
User research and testing
We ran moderated usability tests with 8 users who had recently opened accounts, using mid-fidelity Figma prototypes. Our goals were to learn:
Which tasks users were most motivated to complete
How much guidance or explanation they needed
Where friction existed in the current product flow
Findings:
Users appreciated having a checklist-style experience, especially if they could pause and return later
Too much FI-branded marketing language reduced perceived trust
Immediate benefits (e.g., “get paid early with direct deposit”) improved completion rates
Design
I led the design of the Onboarding Guides UI, focusing on:
A modular card-based system to highlight key setup steps
Progress indicators to encourage completion
Lightweight personalization, allowing each FI to prioritize different actions
Working closely with engineering and PMs, we ensured the design system was scalable across mobile and web, and that FI partners could control their own copy and featured actions via a CMS.
OLD
NEW
Outcome
The guides have since become a core feature available to all Narmi clients and a key selling point in B2B demos.
increase in users adding their card to Apple/Google Pay
increase in direct deposit enrollments within the first 30 days
increase in users configuring alert settings
customers showed greater user engagement
Conclusion
This project was a prime example of balancing B2B and B2C thinking: building a flexible tool for our partner banks, while designing a user-centered flow that made complex tasks feel easy and rewarding.
It also deepened my appreciation for designing habit-forming experiences, not with nudges or spammy tactics, but by meeting users with clarity, trust, and well-timed value.
Additional actions
Alerts
Stay on top of your money with real-time alerts for account activity, payments, and more.
Subscription management
Allowing our customers to easily track, manage and cancel their subscriptions.