PNC Bank CashFlow Options

In the teeth of the 2008 financial crisis, we worked with PNC Bank’s Middle Market Commercial Banking team to help them seize the future by developing new service innovations targeting CFO’s of middle market sized companies. The critical challenge was to enable the PNC team to gain a deeper and more accurate understanding of the needs of CFO’s and where and how a bank could potentially fit in to satisfy these needs.

Our first step was to conduct ethnographic interviews with CFO’s around the country, getting to know their business challenges, and most importantly, understanding the “jobs to be done” in the conduct of their everyday business. A fundamental insight we learned was that banks were viewed “transactionally” by CFO’s rather than as partners or consultants who could do more than provide credit and other traditional bank services. This insight framed the real challenge, which was “how can PNC become more of an indispensable partner with CFO’s of middle market companies?”

From this perspective, we identified and quantitatively tested a large number of need statements using our Futurecaster research methodology that enables us to focus in on the most important and unmet needs of our target CFO’s. The results were clear— CFO’s needed a way to better understand their cashflow, both current and future. With this priority need in mind, we led the PNC Middle Market Banking team through an ideation process that identified the potential concept of an online portal for CFO’s that could provide a variety of financial views of their business, and most importantly, cash flow. We developed this concept in the form of a “new business presentation” that could be tested and refined with CFO’s. The result was the Cash Flow Insights online tool that has served as the centerpiece of PNC’s Commercial Banking Offering since its launch in 2013.