Case USA53: How a Retail Bank Repackaged Customer Personas as Enterprise Architecture Strategy

Sunil Dutt Jha
Jul 28
1 min read

Updated: Nov 3

Overview:

This case is part of a 100-diagnostic series exposing how US banks have mislabeled marketing and design artifacts as “Enterprise Architecture progress.”

A recurring pattern is treating customer persona work as an architectural strategy. The bank’s segmentation project delivered detailed customer profiles, journey maps, and targeted offers — presented as a transformation blueprint.

Yet the enterprise structure connecting products, compliance, operations, and customer service around those personas was never modeled.

P1–P6 Insight Preview:

P1 (Strategy): Personas were positioned as the organizing principle for the bank’s operating model, but they weren’t linked to risk management, compliance, or enterprise-wide KPIs.

P2 (Process): Marketing-led processes were mapped, but there was no integration with back-office flows like underwriting, settlement, or fraud handling.

P3 (System): CRM, loan origination, and servicing systems still used separate data schemas; behavior flows for persona-driven servicing were undefined.

P4 (Component): Campaign management tools, product calculators, and service portals operated with little governance consistency.

P5 (Implementation): Persona-driven changes were deployed as front-end enhancements, but backlog priorities ignored core systems alignment.

P6 (Operations): Business ops executed targeted campaigns well, but tech ops handled constant exceptions where customer interactions didn’t match back-end processes.

Role Disconnects:

CEO: “Our personas put the customer at the center” — but operational delivery is still product-first.
CIO: “We’ve aligned systems to customer needs” — but only at the interface level.
Sales Head (Retail Banking): “Our offers are hitting the right segments” — yet fulfillment lags because product and service workflows are misaligned.
Chief EA: “We’ve wrapped old systems in a new narrative, not an enterprise model”
Head of Customer Experience: “Marketing campaigns feel seamless — until customers call and the service desk sees a different picture”