Bpifrance is a one-stop shop for entrepreneurs with diverse lending, capital investment, and coaching solutions. Its mission is supporting business growth at every stage of a company’s journey. Bpifrance faced the challenge of meeting the diverse needs of their numerous customers while moving from a physical to a hybrid model, where digital solutions had to exceed their clients' expectations.
Challenge: Addressing customer needs efficiently and with vision
Bpifrance's design organization faced the challenge of addressing their entrepreneurial customers' diverse needs while maintaining a purpose-driven vision. The goal was to reduce low value-add tasks, allowing the team to focus on meaningful projects, boosting motivation and efficiency. This streamlined approach aimed to quickly identify impactful digital solutions for their clientele, leading to enhanced customer experiences and improved operational performance.
To achieve these goals, Bpifrance established key research objectives for their design process:
- Minimize complexity identifying customer needs across varied customer base
- Remove guesswork in the design process to enable fast iteration
- User Research team to scale continuous discovery research practice across 20+ product teams
- Goal of empowering product teams to run research autonomously in the near future
Background: Bpifrance’s design approach
Jean-Baptiste Kaloya, Head of Product Design at Bpifrance, describes their design approach as "very iterative and mixing all the expertise of design at once," including user research, UX writing, UI design, and branding. To give a picture of the team’s holistic view on design, the Bpifrance team accounts for compliance restraints through UX copy testing, and wireframe designs are elevated with illustrations and sketches “to integrate our brand DNA and bring emotions from the first version of new interfaces.” Talking to Maze, Jean-Baptiste emphasized the importance of understanding the "real needs and motivations of their end-users," and how Maze has made that possible for them.
Solution: Continuous Product Discovery with Maze, time-to-insight 2x faster
Maze provided the perfect solution for Bpifrance's needs. In 2022, the bank revamped its research strategy, introducing a continuous learning loop with end-users to gather regular feedback on product iterations due to the scale of the design team. The User Research team at Bpifrance facilitated and structured research for their 20+ product teams, aiming to empower them to run research independently with Maze in the near future.
Maze allows us to democratize research across multiple teams, which means we now collect feedback and insights 2x faster than before, both internally and externally.
Jean-Baptiste Kaloya, Head of Product Design at Bpifrance
Results: Taking a new financial product to market 3x faster
In 2022, Bpifrance launched its new lending offer for SMBs. The launch marked a significant move in its fintech transformation, with an all-new 100% digital credit granting as part of its Banking-as-a-Service activity. And it did so in under two months—three times faster than previous launches. Here’s how running research through Maze supported the launch:
- Maze helped Bpifrance reduce guesswork in the design process and quickly validate product iterations with end users
- Product discovery conducted early enough to understand the real needs of their customers
- Tested multiple iterations of product flows and landing pages with several hundred small businesses
- Learnings from Maze reports boosted decision confidence 30%, with intuitive reporting helping generate executive buy-in and sponsorship
- Tripled the speed of user testing process in comparison to past product launches
With Maze we quickly reduce uncertainties in design by testing at scale with our end-users.
Jean-Baptiste Kaloya, Head of Product Design at Bpifrance
