Making deposit regulation clear for customers and bankers

Imagine your bank gets in touch to explain what happens to your money if the bank fails. Even when the news is reassuring, it’s an unsettling message to read.

That was the job. In 2023 New Zealand passed the Deposit Takers Act. It required banks to put in place the Depositor Compensation Scheme (DCS), which protects eligible deposits up to $100,000 per person, per bank. Banks had to tell customers about it. On paper, that’s a compliance task. In practice, the message arrives for people who might already be anxious about money. Westpac needed to meet the Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s (RBNZ) requirements without alarming anyone.

I led the UX from end to end, across the website, the app and the tools bankers use. Each person on the team owned their own part, and we worked closely with product owners, developers and compliance.

• The researcher led 30 in-depth interviews. I supported and listened in.
• The content designer wrote the copy, and helped with note-taking and some testing sessions.
• The service designer led communications and the overall plan and timelines, and led the later co-design workshops.
• I co-led a 30-person workshop to pull out customer needs and emotions.
• I owned the journey framework, the hypotheses, the prototypes for customers and bankers, the testing, and how the findings shaped the programme.

We had three things to solve. The rules were complex, and customers needed simple answers about who was covered. Customers ranged from people with small balances to clients with more than $100,000, each with different worries. And bankers needed the right information to answer questions confidently.

Using Westpac’s experience framework, I identified six journeys the scheme would affect. They ran from low-balance customers wanting reassurance, to people from other banks looking for reliable information during a crisis. These became the base for every decision that followed.

For each journey I mapped what customers needed at each step, then added rows for risk, emotion and how information was delivered. The programme kept using the map to stay aligned, long after the first playback.

The service designer led a series of co-design workshops, which I supported and co-facilitated. One was a Crazy 8s session, where people sketch eight quick ideas in eight minutes. It produced more than 200 ideas. Not all were practical, but they raised good questions, like how to show coverage visually and which phrases made people worry. Then we weighed cost and priority in feasibility sessions with several departments.

The bank had real worries about how customers would react. Would they panic about their money? Would they call the bank or visit a branch? Would they split their savings across other banks? We turned these worries into six hypotheses and tested them with customers. These are the ones that shaped the final design.

After reading, most customers said they would do nothing. Some would google it or talk to friends, and a few would adjust how much they keep with each bank.

Based on this, we recommended contacting customers by email and an in-app message about a month before the scheme started, with one public web page as the single source of truth for customers and bankers.

I led the testing, with the content designer supporting. With 9 customers, we tested whether the content was easy to find and understand. With 17 staff, we tested whether they could find it and explain it accurately.

• For customers: a dedicated web page with plain-language information about who’s eligible and which products are covered.
• For bankers: a rewritten knowledge base, focused on what the change meant and how to explain it.
• For the bank: tested answers to the programme’s key questions, to help it plan.

The web page and banker content went live by July 2025.

Compliance and empathy can sit together, but only if design is in the room early, while the programme is still deciding what to say.

Testing our hypotheses with real people, rather than assuming, gave the programme clear answers. Clear, calm information gave customers what they needed.

It also changed how I think about vulnerability. People can feel exposed for many reasons, from money worries to not trusting big institutions. Customers valued clear facts and choice over being told what to do.