Financial Services

Invesco

Transforming a global financial brand into the industry’s most client-centric thought leader  

Swiss Re

Future-proofing the brand in a rapidly changing world

Addiko Bank

Regaining brand reputation & customer trust

CASE STUDY

Invesco

Transforming a global financial brand into the industry’s most client-centric thought leader  

Challenge

The financial services industry often struggles with differentiation, where many brands blend into a ‘sea of sameness.’ Invesco, a global leader in investment management, has long been recognized for delivering unique investment experiences that help clients achieve more in life. However, in a rapidly evolving landscape, staying attuned to client behavior and appealing to a new generation of clients is critical. With a fresh global vision to become the most client-centric firm in the industry, Invesco turned to Prophet to evolve its brand – ensuring it stood out, fulfilled its promise to create greater possibilities for clients and attracted top talent.   

Solutions

To transform Invesco’s brand, we began by challenging them to think differently. What if it looked and sounded less like a typical financial services company and more like a publisher? This editorial mindset became the core of the brand’s new direction.  

We refreshed existing brand assets to leverage their equity while introducing new ones that were enhanced with illustrations and CGI, alongside photography, to visually bring this editorial direction to life. To accompany the visuals, we crafted a new tone of voice, defining Invesco as ‘The Intelligent Conversationalist’ – a persona designed to build relationships with audiences and reinforce their thought leadership.  

A key aspect of the rebrand was also reaffirming Invesco’s commitment to its employees, crucial for attracting and retaining top talent. We developed a new employee value proposition (EVP) that clearly articulated the mutual expectations between the company and its employees, fostering a culture focused on delivering greater possibilities for clients.  

Given Invesco’s global presence, it was essential to ensure that employees across all regions embraced and embodied the new brand. We launched an activation plan under the theme ‘Like it, Love it, Live it!’ – a month-long campaign designed to build engagement and excitement. Additionally, we developed a new brand platform to provide ongoing access to the brand toolkit and conducted tone of voice training sessions worldwide, creating a unified ‘One Invesco’ voice.  

Results

Invesco successfully launched its new brand, distinguished by a fresh look and feel that set it apart from competitors while delivering on its promise to clients. Employees are now equipped to clearly articulate Invesco’s unique value proposition, unified under the ‘One Invesco’ voice, driving greater consistency across the globe and within each region.

Think Editorial

During our immersion process, it became clear that Invesco’s strength lies in its diverse perspectives. Building on this insight, we established the foundational design principle, ‘Think Editorial.’ This approach encourages Invesco to act like a publisher, infusing editorial flair into both their visual identity and tone of voice. By offering such value to clients, sharing information from useful sources and being a respected voice online, Invesco can position itself as the most client-centric firm in the financial services industry.  

Fine-Tuning our Words

To enhance the editorial impact, we paired the expressive serif of Invesco Editor with the versatile sans-serif Graphik. This combination allows the brand to seamlessly deliver its tone of voice across various needs – from marketing communications to legal disclaimers – ensuring that every word resonates with clarity and purpose.   

“It was essential that Invesco flex its visual system to engage audiences at different stakeholder levels. To achieve this, we used imagery, illustration and 3D visuals with an intelligent, thought-provoking twist to communicate a wide variety of messages across the business.”

Shammi Umeria
Associate Creative Director, Prophet

Bringing it all together

We crafted a wide array of assets, including illustrations and CGI, to enable fresh, dynamic communications while avoiding over-reliance on any one asset or image style. A flexible framework was essential to effectively utilizing these assets. Collaborating closely with the internal brand team, we developed an online brand hub, complete with guidance and training modules, empowering teams to embrace and celebrate the brand with a unified visual and verbal approach.  

Clearer analysis 

Data is Invesco’s lifeblood and their expertise lies in making it meaningful for clients and partners. To support its goal of becoming the most client-centric organization in the industry, we created distinctive and clear data visualizations. By carefully curating color selections and sequences, we ensured that insights are always presented with simplicity and clarity.  

Everything in its right place 

Visual assets are not enough on their own. How they’re arranged is just as important as the assets themselves. We designed an underlying grid system that enables Invesco to consistently present information across all communications, ensuring everything is in its right place and delivering a cohesive brand experience .

“We’re moving away from a legacy of multiple identity variations, to create one clear, global brand. Where the brand needed to ‘Act Local’ the assets adapted to cultural nuances, localizing communications and staying connected to Invesco’s clients.”

Gregg Finlay
Executive Creative Director & Partner, Prophet

CUNA Mutual Group Becomes TruStage

Introducing a single powerful brand, from strategy to execution

Swiss Re

Future-proofing the brand in a rapidly changing world

MetLife

Creating a differentiated retirement solution value proposition for the new generation of customers

CASE STUDY

CUNA Mutual Group Becomes TruStage

Introducing a single powerful brand, from strategy to execution

Challenge

CUNA Mutual Group, a storied financial institution rooted in the credit union movement, has grown and diversified over its 80-year history. By 2021, it had become a $5 billion mutual insurance company providing services to credit unions, their members and other financial institutions. But while it delivered many products and services, it did so by using many different brands. CUNA Mutual Group wanted a unified strategy that matched its ambition, enabling it to continue its growth trajectory.

Solutions

To develop their vision for the future, CUNA Mutual Group partnered with Prophet, leveraging our interdisciplinary approach to craft a single-brand strategy, marrying the enterprise’s strong history with its growth ambitions.

This cross-functional team started with a clarified purpose for the enterprise, including the brand’s promise and principles. Using this distilled North Star, the organization now had somewhere to turn to ensure product-level value propositions align with core values and its plans for the future.

TruStage, CUNA Mutual Group’s successful insurance brand, emerged as the answer. TruStage illustrates how the company builds on trust, helping customers and the people they serve confidently navigate every stage of their financial journey.

Prophet worked closely with the company as it activated the new TruStage brand, finding ways to elevate and expand this brand for all stakeholders.

A core component of this approach involved equipping teams with the tools to pursue continued growth. That entailed bringing the new brand to life with comprehensive training to support employees. We created inspiring activations, designing immersive digital and physical employee experiences deployed during launch week, and giving them everything they need to carry the momentum forward. We also produced a comprehensive external brand campaign, including creative assets and tactical media plan, for the launch.

All told, Prophet delivered:

Brand architecture and nomenclature strategy that supports a single brand strategy
Visual and verbal identity and core messaging for key audiences
A unified web experience that streamlined multiple unique web properties under one digital front door
A purposeful and holistic enterprise content strategy
Social channel architecture and taxonomy that clarifies and reinforces the single brand strategy
A first ever corporate brand campaign, including comprehensive creative development and media plan
An ongoing brand health tracking system

Results

The TruStage enterprise brand launched in May of 2023, generating exceptional internal and external engagement. Employees – many working remotely – returned to the office for various events during launch week, with an impressive 83% participation rate. The brand awareness campaign reached nearly 42 million targeted users, with ad engagement rates five times stronger than projected.

“Prophet was an instrumental partner in launching our TruStage brand, working closely with our teams as collaborative partners, to help define our brand strategy and architecture, and develop an integrated internal and external launch plan that brought our brand to life for our employees and our current and prospective customers. Prophet’s expertise enabled us to achieve strong impact at launch, providing over 5x more engagement than anticipated and more efficiently than we were expecting.”

Eric Hansing
Chief Marketing Officer

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CASE STUDY

Commonwealth

Building a foundation for uncommon growth through an evolved operating model

Challenge

Founded in 1979, Commonwealth is one of the largest independent broker-dealers in the U.S., serving over 2,000 independent financial advisors. The company is also a paragon of advisor experience and service excellence. Commonwealth has been named “#1 in Independent Advisor Satisfaction” by J.D. Power 10 times since 2010 (2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2018-2023), consistently setting the bar for advisor service in an increasingly competitive industry. Amid changing industry dynamics and consolidation, the company’s leadership wanted to build on its strong foundation of excellence to bring unparalleled service to an even larger base of advisors. The company set an ambitious goal to grow the enterprise to $1 trillion in assets under management (AUM) – nearly 4x its current business. At the same time, leadership recognized that the company’s current operating model would not scale with its new transformational ambition. Leaders agreed that modern product management methods and team structures would help the company grow while maintaining its industry-leading standard of advisor excellence. Leadership also knew that digital products, services and experience would be critical, as their advisor customers increasingly looked to flexible and efficient digital solutions to grow their own businesses.  

Solutions

Our work together started by partnering with Commonwealth’s leadership team to identify the specific value levers where a product-oriented operating model might drive growth. A core team of Prophet and Commonwealth members then explored leading practices in modern digital product management, directly engaging with pioneering leaders from other leading organizations, both within and outside of the Financial Services sector. Having explored multiple options, the core team and senior leaders applied their new insights to Commonwealth’s business, aligning on both a target operating model as well as an interim transitional state, and organizing its broad range of products and services into four clear portfolios.  

After the target operating model was defined, we co-developed detailed process designs and governance models to clarify how decisions would be made in the new models. We also conducted a detailed capability assessment of 45 individual product management capabilities based on Prophet’s proprietary capability model. Where the team identified and prioritized capability gaps, we defined 25 detailed initiatives to address them, outlining the activities, resources and accountability for each. The core team and senior leaders convened to review the initiatives in detail and sequence them into an agreed roadmap for transformation.  

Evolving Commonwealth’s organization required significant changes to team structures and roles, as well as the talent and skills to fulfill them (“Body” and “Mind” in Prophet’s Human-Centered Transformation Model, respectively). However, we also knew that we needed to appeal to the organization’s “Soul” to make changes stick.

Commonwealth is recognized across the industry for its strong company culture and unrelenting dedication to the advisor experience. To ensure that changes were understood to be in pursuit of those ‘North Star’ values, our core team developed a robust change management plan to coordinate clear communications and support the behavioral changes required at all levels – from senior leaders to individual contributors.   

Results

Our partnership over an initial 12-week engagement helped the Commonwealth team accelerate its transformational growth journey. The company created and staffed a new executive position: the Chief Product Officer. All Commonwealth products and services now operate within the four new portfolios – each with their own newly aligned leadership – and select product teams have begun applying agile development methods. The company has also mobilized a transformation management team to coordinate capability building across the organization and deliver its transformation roadmap. Most importantly, Commonwealth’s senior leadership and executive teams are moving forward with clarity and confidence toward the goal of $1 trillion in AUM and are ready to maintain their title of undisputed champions of advisor experience over the next decade.

“At Commonwealth, we’re obsessed with the experience of our advisors, and so we understand and appreciate what ‘partnership’ really means. The Prophet team were true partners – they worked with us to understand our business and our team and helped us find the approach for us. I’m excited for the journey to come, and the momentum they’ve helped us build.”

Rory Barratt
Chief Strategy and Product Officer

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CASE STUDY

Swiss Re

Future-proofing the brand in a rapidly changing world

Challenge

The world – and what needs to be insured and reinsured – is fundamentally changing. Swiss Re, a world-leading provider of reinsurance and insurance, had seen the needs of its clients and partners reshaped by the likes of global warming, the expanding role of digital and data in consumers’ lives, new types of risk and an increasingly disruptive competitor set.

Swiss Re had already evolved its business strategy to better address these new, emerging realities and the changing risk landscape. But, with a new customer-centric business strategy in place, it was vital that the Swiss Re brand better connected with its audiences in a more compelling way.

Solutions

Prophet partnered with Swiss Re to redefine their brand strategy, including a refreshed brand positioning, an evolved visual identity and a first-in-kind audio brand. Collaborating with all corners of the global Swiss Re team – and with a deep understanding of the challenges that the brand needed to address – we set about developing a more relevant and differentiated position in the market.

The refreshed brand positioning now reflects the dynamic, digital-first Swiss Re has become and demonstrates the firm’s growth ambition. This distinctive positioning brings its tech and innovation, data and insights and societal leadership strengths to the fore to better reflect new types of risk that clients face, as well as attract new talent and partners.

To support the new brand strategy, there was a need to advance the visual identity to embrace all facets of the business and build a sense of ‘oneness’ in today’s digital world. Prophet partnered with the team to activate the identity with a suite of design assets including bespoke imagery, to act as a metaphor for how Swiss Re powers progress and their unique perspectives on the world. And – rather atypical for a business-to-business brand – an audio brand was introduced to strike the right tone and deliver a more contemporary expression of the brand.

Results

Awarded a prestigious Red Dot Design Award in 2022 and a German Brand Award in 2023, the sophisticated refreshed brand reaffirms Swiss Re’s leading position in the industry as a future-ready business, working to attract new talent, stand out against the competition and unlock new opportunities for the company. Well received internally, it is also resonating with employees, enforcing the unifying notion of ‘oneness.’

“Prophet’s unique approach to strategic design has delivered a far more contemporary and sophisticated expression of the brand. We couldn’t be more proud of the outcome.”

Dr. Jan Dietrich Müller
Head Group Communications, Managing Director

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CASE STUDY

MetLife

Creating a differentiated retirement solution value proposition for the new generation of customers

Challenge

MetLife, one of the largest life insurance companies in the world, is committed to providing deep and meaningful values to its customers as a trusted life partner.

Prophet has been a long-term partner with MetLife to help the brand propel its customer-centric transformation across the globe. In China, we started by helping MetLife China develop the overall customer value proposition – “Global Protection, Human Care.” We have also developed a series of customer-centric value propositions and solutions, including health, wealth, and education, to accelerate its transformation ambition in China.

Retirement planning has been a rising need for Chinese consumers, given the aging population, declining fertility rate, shortage of public retirement funds and the shortage of retirement facilities in China. MetLife partnered with Prophet to uncover insights into Chinese consumers’ retirement needs and to co-create a distinctive and compelling retirement value proposition and solution that truly meets Chinese consumers’ retirement needs.

Solutions

Through our research, we found that younger Chinese consumers, between the ages of 30 to 45, feel anxious and uncertain about retirement.

To understand consumer retirement needs, we spoke to people from different life stages and household statuses. From there, we identified four consumer insights that create distinctive market opportunities for MetLife China to develop its retirement value proposition:

Retirement preparation: First, retirement needs do not start in people’s 60s. Consumers want to start retirement planning early. Health issues often trigger consumers to start thinking about retirement planning. Protecting themselves from aging-related health issues has become a big part of their retirement preparation beyond financial preparation.
Retirement services: In China, while most retirees prefer to stay in their homes for retirement, there’s a shortage of retirement services and facilities options. Consumers are less worried about covering their daily living expenses and medical bills and are instead concerned about access to quality services and facilities.
Family support: For Chinese consumers, retirement is not an individual need but requires planning as a family. Most of them need to ensure support for their elderly parents before they can think about retirement preparation for themselves which still requires not only financial support but also quality retirement and health service support.
Mental health: Retirement is more than just financial stability. It is also about the long-established life rhythm and goals. Many Chinese consumers feel a loss of identity and meaning after they retire. A critical part of ensuring individuals thrive in retirement is to figure out how to be mentally prepared and how to leverage the abundant free time to explore new hobbies, expand their horizons and socialize.

After gaining a deep understanding of these needs, our team worked with MetLife to articulate its retirement value proposition– “Helping you and your family achieve total preparation towards a fulfilling life post-retirement.” We also worked with MetLife’s key stakeholders to co-create the product, service and experience of the retirement solution and developed a clear roadmap to bring the retirement solution to life and for future upgrades.

Next, our design team created graphics to bring the value proposition to life visually by developing detailed design guidelines for the retirement solution to ensure its visual identity system is compatible with MetLife’s master brand visual system and architecture. Additionally, we have designed brochures and other communication materials for internal and external communications.

Results

MetLife China launched its new retirement solution, 360Future, in December 2022. Through a live-streaming launch event, MetLife shared inspiring stories and distinctive insights from their employees, customers and industry experts.

Prophet’s Associate Partner, Lily Wen was invited to join the panel discussion to highlight global and Chinese consumers’ unique challenges toward retirement. “Consumers’ retirement needs are multi-dimensional. Helping them develop the numerical financial goal alone can’t truly solve their worries, anxiety, and confusion toward retirement,” Lily said, “Financial service companies must address Chinese consumers’ holistic needs, by supporting their desire to secure their parents’ retirement while providing quality health and medical services beyond just financial security.”

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CASE STUDY

GAINS

Inspiring the next generation of girls with a new messaging strategy

Challenge

Though more women than ever are graduating with degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, men make up most of the workforce. This is because many young girls do not pursue a career in STEM, they have more barriers to getting there, they’re traditionally offered less encouragement and they have fewer female role models.

Girls Advancing in STEM (GAINS) Initiative is a nonprofit on a mission to break down barriers by empowering high school girls to envision, prepare for and pursue academic and professional futures in STEM. GAINS’ clubs and conferences tackle this head-on by helping students discover STEM topics and professions, connect with other like-minded girls and learn from industry professionals. To further its mission and expand its impact, GAINS needed a compelling messaging strategy that would resonate with a wide audience to grow its membership and clubs around the country.

Solutions

Drawing insights from a series of qualitative interviews with students and volunteers, we collaborated with the GAINS leadership team to define a new brand strategy framework for the organization. Prophet’s consultants added substantive detail to the framework—developing the context statement, brand promise and overarching theme, which formed the foundation of the work.

Once these elements were in place, our team of strategists and verbal branding experts built out robust messaging guidelines to reinforce the core components of this newly defined strategy. We created three supporting messaging themes to spotlight the community, learning opportunities and networking benefits of GAINS. Through a rigorous creative process, we codified messaging guidelines to help bring the new strategy to life. The guidelines included sample words and phrases for each theme, guidance on when to leverage each theme and how to flex them by audience (current and prospective students, teachers and volunteers) and tips on how to ensure a consistent tone of voice across all copy.

Results

The GAINS team has used this messaging across its website, social media channels and marketing materials to target current and prospective students, teachers and volunteers – helping the organization consistently grow its following. In addition, Prophet’s work has helped the organization communicate its mission when applying for grants and seeking partnerships with schools and employers.

Testimonial

“The whole Prophet team listened really well to everything, caught a lot of the nuance and was able to reflect it back as they structured our messaging materials. Having this all laid out has truly helped me refine the message and maintain consistency in our communications.”

Antoinette Decker
Director, Creator

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CASE STUDY

Financial Services Company

Putting customers at the center of an organization’s transformation

Challenge

A large, US financial services company was seeing declining growth in customer acquisition and revenue. Facing key market forces – including shifting consumer behaviors toward greater collaboration and personalization, new threats from fintech entrants and intense competition for top talent – the C-Suite and Board of Directors decided to embark on a complete transformation of the business.

Solutions

Prophet partnered with the company’s CEO, Chief Growth Officer and leadership team to design a transformation agenda that answered a series of strategic questions around:

Developing the organization’s purpose-based strategy
Prioritizing key markets and target customers
Aligning on key products, services and experiences to develop
Building the culture and capabilities required to support the transformation

Prophet then created a multi-year, enterprise-wide roadmap that detailed the initiatives necessary to transform multiple parts of the business in parallel. A Transformation Management Office (TMO) was established to enable and accelerate the company’s three-year transformation, largely through quarterly alignment and funding cycles.

While helping manage the transformation, Prophet brought multi-disciplinary teams to help execute the work across business value drivers: Brand & Marketing, People & Organization, Customer Experience, Products & Services, Sales & Distribution, Data & Analytics. Along the way, Prophet has partnered to build new capabilities and codify processes so the organization can keep transformation momentum in the years to come.

Results

Prophet successfully launched a new brand that established the financial services provider as a leader in the industry. We helped develop a new employee value proposition to recruit top advisors and a new variable annuity product to grow its existing business. Prophet also introduced new revenue streams by helping expand its mutual funds’ presence on third-party platforms and creating a new managed account product – all while targeting and acquiring new buyer segments.

A year into the customer-centric transformation, Prophet is helping drive results such as +5% market awareness, +8% in new business revenue and a 20X increase in new leads.

Impact

increase in market awareness

increase in new business revenue

20x

increase in new leads

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CASE STUDY

Vantage

Reinvigorating a Fintech brand to drive growth

Challenge

Founded in 2009, Vantage is a global multi-asset broker offering clients access to services for trading contracts-for-difference (CFDs) on forex, commodities, indices and shares. As competition in online CFD trading intensifies and customer expectations evolve, Vantage’s brand had become less relevant and harder to differentiate. In addition, its visual identity, which served the broker well in the past decade, lacked a clear proposition and emotional appeal.

A business with the scale and ambition of Vantage needs to make sure that its brand expression is not only consistent and coherent globally, but also relevant to both institutional broker (IB) partners and individual retail investors across different markets. Thus, Prophet was engaged to reinvigorate Vantage’s brand with a clear, insights-driven brand positioning and modern, compelling visual identity.

Solutions

Prophet took a hypothesis-led yet rigorous approach to activate Vantage’s internal expertise and explore new external opportunities. By immersing in stakeholder interviews, 360-degree competitor audit, as well as AI-driven customer research, we obtained a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of Vantage, including its ambition to its capabilities, competitors and target customers.

Our strategy team then used these insights to define Vantage’s new brand positioning – to “provide a trusted trading ecosystem that enables customers to achieve their own success, faster and simpler”. Based on the brand positioning, we crafted a messaging framework and the brand voice to guide what the brand says and how the brand speaks. We also simplified its brand name from “Vantage FX” to “Vantage” to better reflect the company’s ambition to be a multi-asset trading platform beyond FX trading.

To bring the strategy to life, our design team built upon the big idea of “Shared Success” and applied the Fibonacci Golden Ratio in creating Vantage’s new visual identity system. The Fibonacci Golden Ratio is not only permeated in nature and art but also prevalent in financial markets – Fibonacci retracement levels are often key indicators to predict market movements. The idea resonates with the brand category and strategy to resemble precision, growth patterns, perfect harmony and concise prediction of patterns in an ecosystem.

To help Vantage envision its new visual identity, we created customized iconography, brand and photography guidelines, as well as a wide range of applications including website and mobile app re-skin.

Results

Vantage launched its new brand globally with a resounding impact. It was well-received by industry peers at its unveiling in November 2021. The group achieved a significant increase of nearly 30% in new users in three months, compared to the same period before the rebrand.

Vantage was also recognized at the 2021 Transform Awards Asia, for the categories of ‘Best brand development project to reflect the changed mission, values or positioning’ and the ‘Best visual identity from the financial services sector’.

“Our rebranding exercise was the long-awaited change that our business needed, and Prophet was the ideal partner to assist us through the entire process. From the initial interviews to the final reveal of our new brand identity, the Prophet team has been more than instrumental in its assessment and recommendations,” says David Shayer, CEO of Vantage UK.

“The results of the rebrand speak for itself. Removing FX from our name has allowed us to speak more closely to our multi-asset offering, and our new brand puts us closer to our clients who share the same values. With a refocused business direction, we are empowered to continue the work of enhancing our tools and platforms to bring about an unparallel trading experience for our clients.

“The rebrand has also opened doors to some prominent partnerships, including our recent sponsorship of the McLaren Extreme E, which highlights our push for greater sustainability, diversity, and inclusion within the financial services industry in the coming years.”

“From the initial interviews to the final reveal of our new brand identity, the Prophet team has been more than instrumental in their assessment and recommendations.”

David Shayer
UK CEO

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CASE STUDY

Global Investment Advisory Firm

Developing a revamped direct marketing strategy to drive sales and ROI

Challenge

The client, a major investment advisory firm, had a history of successfully executing aggressive direct marketing tactics. In fact, nearly all of its customers were acquired through direct advertising.

While the company was experiencing steady growth, it had an ambitious goal of doubling its assets under management within just a few years. To achieve this, the organization needed help attracting new client profiles and successfully moving prospects through the marketing funnel.

Solutions

Through qualitative and quantitative consumer research of prospects in four countries, our team of financial services experts partnered with the investment advisory company to gain a deep understanding of the existing prospect journey and identify the conversion gaps on the way to becoming a paying customer.

By taking a digital approach, we uncovered that our client could:

Better reach prospects with varying degrees of familiarity with the company
Add interventions at key decision points of hiring a financial advisor
Develop engaging direct marketing content

To bring the strategy to life, Prophet helped the client create an activation roadmap to illustrate how to convert prospects by focusing on both short-term ‘Quick Wins’ and longer-term initiatives. The roadmap is supported by a ‘test and learn’ pilot plan outlining specific processes, KPIs and resources needed to measure impact.

Results

Our project had a few key impacts on our client’s business. First, we transformed their view of the prospect journey. We helped the team of leaders see that the route from prospect to the client is dynamic, but it can be directed at key inflection points. Second, we demonstrated that a broader range of prospects could be converted into clients through our new view of the prospect journey and our market research analysis. As a result, our client changed their view of who qualifies as a ‘qualified prospect.’ Finally, our actionable activation roadmap accelerated the client’s direct marketing efforts and propelled it toward achieving its ambitious growth goal.

As a result of our project, our client observed a direct lift in sales and better ROI on direct marketing spending.

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CASE STUDY

AXA

Meet Emma, the future of humanized insurance experience

Challenge

AXA is one of the world’s leading insurance companies offering diverse financial services globally. To successfully grow its business in Asia, the client recognized the need to create a more consistent and human brand throughout the region.

On the back of a new global vision – from Payer to Partner – AXA partnered with Prophet to develop an Asia-specific solution that would deliver on their ambition to:

create a more consistent customer journey and brand experience across the region
develop a new customer engagement proposition that also humanize the experience through a new digital platform
develop digital touchpoints to drive greater engagement with existing and potential customers.

Solutions

Through deep consumer research and segmentation, Prophet partnered with AXA to create a regional well-being strategy, develop a new customer experience, and run UX & UI sprints to design a new digital product.

We began by conducting a multi-country regional segmentation, incorporating both qualitative and quantitative research across five key markets in Asia (China, Hong Kong, Philippines, Thailand and Japan). Over 4,000 customers were surveyed to better understand what they wanted from an insurance company when it came to their health, well-being and mental health. This research created the foundation for the development of a value proposition that defined the future of digital customer experience (DCX) at AXA.

To bring the strategy to life, we set out to reimagine the customer experience, taking a fresh look at how to create a new insurance platform that combined insurance e-servicing, 3^rd party health and wellness digital services and a new conversational chatbot and virtual concierge. Importantly, at the core of this new experience was an empathetic and human approach on well-being topics for customers, elevating the AXA brand on an experience level never attempted at the organization.

From this strategic foundation, Emma was born — AXA’s first humanized user interface, which became the core of the brand’s new digital customer experience. This seamless experience – from claims to servicing, health content, symptom checker, and more – was embodied in a single Emma ecosystem for current AXA customers as well as prospects.

With Payer to Partner at the core of its proposition, Emma’s persona was designed to be an Empathetic Navigator, helping individuals find the solutions and content most relevant to their well-being needs. Prophet further “personified” Emma, crafting a real-life avatar, her tone of voice, and the visual expression across a full identity system.

A key highlight of the process was a two-day Hackathon to create “Emma”. Over 70 global leaders and stakeholders across diverse disciplines gathered together to “hack” the Emma experience. It was the first time in AXA’s history and probably the largest cross geographic collaboration of its kind.

Results

Emma was piloted then launched in Hong Kong in Q4 of 2019.

Emma is bridging the gap between digital engagement and financial advisor partners. As of 1H of 2020, Emma’s launch in Hong Kong drew more than 2 million logins, exceeding expectations. Emma is now being rolled out across the rest of Asia.

The digital brand experience we created for AXA won the gold award for “Best Use of Digital in the Financial Services Sector” at the 2021 Digital Impact Awards Asia, as well as two awards at the 2020 Transform Awards Asia, including a gold award for “Best Brand Experience” and a silver award for “Best Visual Identity” from the financial services sector.

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