The strategy I’d approach
The bank holds all the clarity
and hands over almost none of it.
“Everything takes +3 months longer than it should.”
Rabobank review · Trustpilot
I read every public review of Rabobank I could find. The complaint is almost never the answer people got. It is not knowing where they are. Another reviewer opened a business account and describes it as taking two months and being chaos. A third is six months in and still has no internet banking.
The financing journey is a long stretch of uncertainty, and you already hold the information that would end it: which stage, whose desk, what happens next. Handing that over is the design brief. It costs no credit policy, no regulator conversation and no new product, and it is the difference between six weeks of waiting and six weeks of knowing.
Four root causes, ranked
All four are service design problems before they are credit, compliance or engineering problems. All four sit exactly where this role sits: between the client, the banker and the internal stakeholders who each own one piece of it.
If you read one thing, read the orange boxes. That is the failure as an entrepreneur actually meets it.
Ranked by what a service designer could move first
-
01
The customer cannot see where they are
What happensReviewers describe two and a half hours of calling between hold time and waiting for a callback, promised callbacks that never come, and applications that sit without any visible state. One says everything takes three months longer than it should. Another describes internet banking activation taking months despite repeated promises. Rabobank sits at 1.4 on Trustpilot across 2,273 reviews, with 85 per cent at one star.
What the user actually experiencesEVIDENCE Trustpilot 1.4 / 5, 85% one-star across 2,273 reviews · “everything takes +3 months longer than it should” · “2.5 h of calling: waiting time on a call + waiting to call back” · klacht.nl records 664 complaints with a 0% resolution rate WHAT I WOULD DESIGN → A visible state model for the financing journey: what stage you are at, who holds it, what happens next, and by when. Told the same way to the client and to the banker. Service blueprint and prototype in the first quarter.You applied six weeks ago for the money to take on two people. You do not know if it is with credit, with compliance, or on someone’s desk. You cannot plan, so you do not hire. You call, wait fifty minutes, and are told someone will come back to you. Nobody does. You have not been declined. You have just been left.
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02
Nobody owns the whole journey
What happensA financing request crosses the account banker, credit, risk, compliance, product and legal. Each owns a competent piece. The entrepreneur is the only person in the chain holding all of it, and they are the one with the least information and no way to escalate.
What the user actually experiencesEVIDENCE reviewers report being passed between departments and re-explaining from scratch · “unnecessary red tape” on corporate accounts · the role itself names clients, bankers and internal stakeholders as three separate audiences to be understood WHAT I WOULD DESIGN → End-to-end journey and service blueprint across all three, with the handoffs named and one accountable owner per case, visible to the client from the first contact.Every conversation starts from the beginning. You explain your business to the fourth person this month. Each one is helpful and none can tell you when you will know. You are not dealing with a bank, you are dealing with several departments that happen to share a logo.
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03
A no is a dead end rather than a route
What happensDe Nederlandsche Bank found that around 15,000 potential business customers were refused by a bank in a single year, and that only 18 per cent of those refusals had a compliance ground under anti-money-laundering rules. Whatever the reason, a decline usually arrives as an outcome with no explanation the entrepreneur can act on and no route to anything else.
What the user actually experiencesEVIDENCE DNB: ~15,000 business customers refused in a year, 18% on compliance grounds · due-diligence costs passed on at up to €2,000 a year · onboarding at a major bank running to several weeks against hours at digital alternatives WHAT I WOULD DESIGN → The decline as a designed moment: what failed, what would change it, what else is available including guarantee schemes and partners. A no that leaves the relationship intact is worth more than a slow maybe.No. You do not know which part of your case failed, whether it was the numbers, the sector, the age of the business or a policy nobody will name. So you cannot fix it, you cannot try again with confidence, and you tell every other founder you know.
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04
The last time this journey failed, comprehension was the thing missing
What happensBetween 2005 and 2009 Rabobank sold interest rate derivatives to SME entrepreneurs to hedge rising rates on their business loans. Rates fell instead and the products became a cost. The AFM ordered reassessment in 2012, and under the uniform recovery framework Rabobank reserved €700 million, expecting around 10,000 of its 11,500 derivative clients to qualify for compensation, capped at 20 per cent of interest paid and a maximum of €100,000 each, with those holding more than €2.5 million in derivatives excluded entirely.
What the user actually experiencesEVIDENCE sold 2005 to 2009 · AFM reassessment ordered 2012 · €700m reserved · ~10,000 of 11,500 clients expected to qualify · capped at 20% of interest paid, max €100,000 WHAT I WOULD DESIGN → Comprehension as a designed and tested step, not a disclosure. If a client cannot say back what they have agreed to and what happens if rates move, the journey has not finished, whatever the file says.You signed something your banker recommended. Years later you found out what it actually was. It is the most expensive possible version of the same problem in root cause 01: at no point did anyone check whether you understood what was happening to you.
Protect these, and keep strengthening them
Four things here are real assets. The cooperative model and the local bank network give you a relationship with Dutch business that no digital lender can buy. Food and agri expertise is genuine depth in exactly the sectors where lending is hardest to assess. The Design Chapter itself, 190 or so designers with a studio in Utrecht, is a bigger design function than most Dutch companies will ever have. And this role exists, which means someone has already worked out that the lending journey is a design problem. That is the hardest argument to win and it is already won.
User issues
What the public record says about being a Rabobank business customer, and what each finding means for the financing journey. Two things up front: reviews lean angry by nature, and I have no access to your own research, which almost certainly says more than this does.
Three scoreboards, and they all say the same thing
I could not find a single public measure that disagrees with the others. That agreement matters more than any one number, because these are different populations complaining about the same experience.
A zero per cent resolution rate on 664 logged complaints is the number I would want explained first. It may well be an artefact of the platform rather than the bank. But if even a fraction of it is real, it means people are complaining into a channel that never closes the loop, which is the same failure as the lending journey itself: no visible state, no ending.
The complaints
Fourteen, sorted by severity and collapsed by default. Open a bucket, or filter to one. Where something comes from a general review corpus rather than business customers specifically, I have said so.
Critical 5Costs the customer money or the relationship
Named directly by a business reviewer. Others describe internet banking activation running to months and account closure requests unresolved after a year. In lending, elapsed time is not a service metric, it is the customer’s cost of capital and their hiring plan.
Customers cannot see which stage they are at or who is holding it. Every status update has to be extracted by phone, which is why the phone queues are what they are.
One reviewer totals it as “2.5 h of calling: waiting time on a call + waiting to call back”. klacht.nl records waits of over forty minutes without ever connecting. Each of those calls is a question the journey should have answered without a human.
DNB found roughly 15,000 business customers refused in a year and only 18 per cent of those on compliance grounds. A decline that cannot be understood cannot be fixed, so the entrepreneur leaves and tells other founders why.
The interest-derivatives file, 2005 to 2009. Historic, resolved, and still the most instructive thing in this document about what a lending journey is actually for.
Serious 5Erodes confidence and generates avoidable contact
The classic symptom of a journey with competent owners of every part and no owner of the whole. Costly for the client and demoralising for the banker, who can see it happening and cannot stop it.
A business account at a major Dutch bank can take several weeks where digital alternatives complete in hours. The comparison is not entirely fair given the obligations, but the customer makes it anyway.
Reported at up to €2,000 a year in some cases. Defensible in policy, corrosive in experience, and rarely explained at the point where it lands.
A reviewer’s phrase. Worth splitting into obligations that genuinely cannot move and process that has simply never been redesigned, because those have opposite fixes.
Scanner devices described as clunky, and the bank described as outdated next to alternatives. General retail feedback rather than business-specific, but it shapes the expectation an entrepreneur brings to a financing application.
Neutral 4Real, but lower impact or outside design
Reviewers report claims denied and difficulty getting information afterwards. Serious, but a different journey from the one this role owns.
Replacement cards, address changes, app login. Retail rather than business lending, and included because it sets the baseline expectation.
Raised often, outside this domain entirely, and listed so the reading of the review corpus is honest rather than selective.
Not a complaint but a limit. Trustpilot self-selects for grievance, so 1.4 is a measure of how bad the worst experiences are, not of average satisfaction. I have treated it that way throughout.
What it translates to
Six themes. The perception column is what an entrepreneur says to their accountant. The last column is what I would actually design, and roughly when.
| Theme | The issue | The perception it creates | What I would design, and when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Invisible state | No visible stage, owner or expected date | “I have no idea if this is even happening” | A shared state model for the journey, told the same way to client and banker. Quarter 1 |
| No single owner | Six functions, one client, no accountable case owner | “I explain my business to someone new every month” | Blueprint with named handoffs and one owner per case. Quarter 1 to 2 |
| Dead-end decline | Refusals without an actionable reason or a route | “No, and nobody will tell me why” | The decline designed as a moment: reason, remedy, alternative. Quarter 2 |
| Comprehension gap | Agreement recorded, understanding not checked | “Nobody asked whether I actually followed that” | A tested comprehension step before signature, not a disclosure. Quarter 2 to 3 |
| Banker friction | Staff can see the problem and cannot resolve it | “Even my own banker is apologising for the process” | The employee journey blueprinted alongside the customer one. Quarter 1 to 2 |
| Unexplained cost | Due-diligence charges arriving without context | “What exactly am I paying for here” | Cost and obligation explained where they land, not in terms. Quarter 3 |
How that compares
The honest finding: every Dutch high-street bank draws the same reviews, and the newer lenders are winning on exactly one axis, which is knowing where you stand. None of them can match a cooperative bank on relationship or on sector depth. That gap is the opening.
Where the business customer actually feels the difference
| Alternative | What they offer | What they cannot do | What it means for Rabobank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rabobank | Relationship, sector depth, the cooperative model, full product range | Match a digital lender on elapsed time | This is the baseline |
| Other Dutch majors | The same products and broadly the same reviews | Differentiate on experience, so far | Nobody in the category has claimed clarity. It is available. |
| Digital and alternative lenders | A decision in days, sometimes hours, and a visible process | Depth, sector understanding, or a banker who knows the business | They are not beating you on money. They are beating you on knowing where you stand. |
| Not applying at all | No rejection, no cost, no wait | Grow | The discouraged borrower is the invisible competitor, and no funnel metric will ever show them to you. |
The read: the entrepreneur who quietly decides not to bother applying is the most expensive customer in this document, and the only one who never appears in any of your data. Designing the journey so that asking feels survivable is the growth argument, not just the experience one.
Design strategies
The same evidence through four lenses. A strategic designer is not hired to make the screens nicer. They are hired to decide which problem the craft is pointed at, and to write that down clearly enough that a domain lead, an architect and a credit officer can all follow it.
Business model innovation
Rabobank is a cooperative. That is not marketing, it is a different answer to who the bank is for, and it is the single biggest asset in this domain. It also creates the tension that runs through everything below: a cooperative is judged on whether it helps its members grow, and a lender is judged on whether it says no often enough.
Value creation
Capital, plus judgement about a sector. A digital lender can price risk from a data feed. A banker who understands greenhouse horticulture or a haulage fleet can see the business behind the numbers. That is the part nobody can copy.
Value capture
Interest and fees over the life of a facility, which means the relationship is worth far more than any single application. The economics reward keeping the entrepreneur, including the ones you decline.
The structural flaw
The process is optimised to reach a correct decision, and it does. It is not optimised to keep the client informed while that happens. So a good outcome arrives inside a bad experience, and the review is about the experience.
The model-level move, and the number I would put on it
Treat elapsed time and uncertainty as product, not overhead. Right now nobody owns the question “how long has this client been waiting without knowing anything”. I would build that measure in the first quarter, split by stage, and report it beside conversion. If a decision genuinely needs six weeks, fine. Six weeks of silence is a different thing, and it is the one that costs you the next application.
The ten types of innovation
Doblin’s framework says winning innovations combine three to five reinforcing types, and that most organisations over-invest in product alone. Mapped to business lending, the opportunity sits almost entirely in Experience and Process.
| Cluster | Type | Where it stands | Opportunity |
|---|---|---|---|
| Configuration | Network | Strong: local banks, sector specialists, guarantee schemes | Make the network visible to the client instead of internal-only |
| Configuration | Process | Six owners, no case owner, no visible state | The highest-leverage work in the domain, and it is service design |
| Configuration | Profit model | Interest and fees over the facility life | Value the retained relationship after a decline, not just the conversion |
| Offering | Product performance | Broad and competent range | Not the constraint. Resist the urge to fix this first |
| Offering | Product system | Products sit beside each other rather than as one route | One financing journey with several possible endings |
| Experience | Service | Hours of hold time, unreturned callbacks | Most of these calls are a status question the journey should answer |
| Experience | Channel | Phone carries what the interface cannot | Move status out of the phone queue and into the journey |
| Experience | Brand | Trusted institution, frustrating process | Clarity as the cooperative promise made concrete |
| Experience | Customer engagement | Contact is mostly the client chasing | Proactive updates: the cheapest trust available |
| Configuration | Structure | Design Chapter of 190+, studio in Utrecht | Already an asset. The question is what it gets pointed at |
The read: Process + Service + Customer engagement is three reinforcing types, which is what the framework says wins. All three are reachable from one service designer’s agenda working with the people already in the domain. None of them requires a new product.
Integrative thinking
Roger Martin describes this as facing two opposing ideas and, instead of picking one, building a resolution that holds both and is better than either. I have a remarkable ability to hold two viewpoints and keep a close pulse on both, and in a bank that is most of the job. Three tensions worth resolving here.
Tension 01
Speed vs. proper assessment
Model A: entrepreneurs need an answer in days, and digital lenders give them one.
Model B: lending decisions carry real obligations and real risk, and rushing them is how banks end up in front of regulators.
How I resolve it: stop treating the two as the same variable. Separate time to a decision from time to knowing where you stand. The first is properly constrained. The second is almost entirely a design choice, and it is the one the customer is actually complaining about. Most of the anger in those reviews would survive a six-week decision that was legible the whole way through.
Tension 02
Standardise vs. know the business
Model A: scale, consistency and compliance all argue for one standard process.
Model B: the reason a business banks with a cooperative is that someone understands their sector, and no standard form captures that.
How I resolve it: standardise the state, not the conversation. Every client sees the same clear stages and the same rules about what happens next. What goes into each stage stays as local and sector-specific as it needs to be. The consistency the customer wants is about knowing what to expect, not about being treated identically.
Tension 03
The customer vs. the banker
Model A: design for the entrepreneur, who is the one being kept in the dark.
Model B: the banker is stuck inside the same broken process, apologising for it, with no power to fix it.
How I resolve it: refuse the choice. The brief already names clients, bankers and internal stakeholders as three audiences, and in this journey they fail together. One blueprint, both sides on it. Every internal handoff that a banker cannot see is a status call the client will make instead.
Design thinking, and where the squiggle actually goes
The squiggle running through this page is the argument: uncertainty up front, clarity earned by narrowing. It is also the shape of the brief, which asks for someone who is comfortable in ambiguity and helps teams move from uncertainty to clarity. That is the part of the work I like most, so here is where I would and would not spend it.
Converge immediately
Visible state, and the decline. Customers have named these repeatedly and precisely. No discovery phase needed to establish that people cannot see where they are. This is design and delivery against a stated complaint, and it is the fastest visible win in the domain.
Stay divergent
What actually happens between the six owners, and what an entrepreneur believes they agreed to. Neither is answerable from reviews. The first needs the process walked end to end with the people who run it. The second needs sitting with clients and asking them to explain their own facility back. That second one is where I would expect the uncomfortable finding.
The gaps worth attacking
Every bank draws these complaints. The question is which openings are available to Rabobank specifically. Five hold up.
- 01
Nobody in Dutch business banking has claimed clarity
The majors get near-identical reviews and the digital lenders win on speed alone. The first bank to make a financing journey legible from end to end takes a position that does not depend on being cheapest or fastest.
- 02
The cooperative promise is currently unevidenced
Being a cooperative should mean the member knows what is happening to them. Right now that is a governance fact rather than an experience. Making it visible in the lending journey is the most concrete version of the brand argument available.
- 03
The employee experience is in scope, and that is rare
Most journey work quietly drops the staff side. This brief names it. Bankers already know exactly where the process fails, and nobody has to run a study to find out. That is a free, fully mapped backlog sitting in the domain.
- 04
The discouraged borrower is invisible and expensive
Every entrepreneur who decides not to apply is missing from every funnel. Finding out how many there are, and why, is a research question nobody in the category has answered publicly.
- 05
There is a 190-person design function already in place
Most organisations at this stage are arguing about whether design belongs in the room. That argument is over here. The remaining question is whether the domain uses it on interfaces or on the journey, and this role is the answer to that.
The journey
What I would actually draw. A financing journey blueprinted across the client, the banker and the back office, with the six places it currently breaks marked on it.
The journey as the entrepreneur experiences it
Six stages. The blue band is what the client can see. The line underneath is what is really happening. The gap between them is the whole problem, and every orange mark is a moment where somebody picks up the phone.
The six break points, and what I would design at each
- 01
Before applying: is this even worth it
The discouraged borrower gives up here and never appears in any funnel. What is missing is an honest, early read on likelihood and what would improve it, before anyone spends a week on paperwork.
DESIGN → an indicative view with the reasons attached, framed as guidance rather than a soft decline. - 02
Submitting: I have sent things into a void
Documents go in with no confirmation that they are the right ones or that anything has started. Every unclear submission becomes a call and a delay.
DESIGN → explicit receipt, a checklist that resolves itself, and the first honest date. - 03
Assessment: the long silence
The longest stage and the emptiest. Internally it is busy the whole time. Externally it looks identical to nothing happening.
DESIGN → stage, holder and expected date, updated when it changes rather than when the client asks. This is the single highest-value change in the domain. - 04
The decision: a no with nowhere to go
Around 15,000 businesses refused in a year, only 18 per cent on compliance grounds. Most declines end the relationship because nothing about them is actionable.
DESIGN → reason, remedy, timeline to reapply, and the alternatives including guarantee schemes and partners. - 05
Signing: agreement recorded, understanding assumed
The derivatives file is what this stage costs when it goes wrong. Signature proves consent. It does not prove comprehension, and the two were treated as the same thing for years.
DESIGN → a tested teach-back before signature: what you have agreed, what it costs, what happens if things move against you. - 06
Living with it: the facility disappears
After drawdown the relationship goes quiet until something is wrong. The client’s circumstances change constantly and the bank finds out last.
DESIGN → a light, regular check-in that surfaces trouble early, which is cheaper for both sides than a restructuring.
Accessibility
This is where I have the most direct experience, and also where I have to be careful about what I claim from the outside.
What I could and could not check
The financing journey sits behind authentication, so I have run no scan and no audit. Nothing here is a finding about Rabobank’s accessibility. What follows is what the regulation requires and what I would do about it.
Where the obligation lands
The European Accessibility Act has applied since June 2025 and banking services are explicitly in scope, including business banking journeys. The expectation is WCAG 2.2 Level AA across the service, not just the marketing site.
Why it belongs in this role
An entrepreneur with a visual impairment applying for finance meets exactly the failures described above, and then some. I hold the Web Accessibility Specialist certification and have audited against WCAG 2.2 since 2022. The useful skill is turning a standard into a short list of things to start with on Monday.
Two independent complaint corpora, with different populations and different motives, name the same thing: not the decision, the not knowing. That agreement across sources is the strongest signal in this document, and it means the first quarter does not need a discovery phase to know where to start.
The plan
Everything above is desk research, and desk research is a hypothesis generator rather than an answer. This is how I would actually run it: the first year, what lands when, and how you would know whether any of it worked.
The framing matters more than the method. The obvious brief is “make lending faster”, and that brief is a trap, because most of the elapsed time is properly constrained and chasing it will burn a year. The real brief is to separate the time a decision needs from the silence around it, and to attack the second one hard.
Walk the journey with the people who run it
Internal and secondary first. It is cheaper, faster, and it tells me what to ask clients.
- Walk the end-to-end financing journey with bankers, credit, risk, compliance and product, mapping every handoff and every point where the client is told nothing
- Analyse the contact record: what business clients call about, in what volume, and at which stage, split into avoidable and unavoidable
- Interviews with domain leads, architects and process managers to surface constraints before I propose anything that ignores them
- Read the existing research. A 190-person Design Chapter has almost certainly answered part of this already, and re-running it would be a waste of a quarter
You get: a current-state service blueprint across client, banker and back office, with the break points marked and sized. Roughly 20 pages, and every team can use it immediately.
Sit with entrepreneurs, including the ones you said no to
Primary research aimed at the specific gaps the framing phase ranked highest.
- Depth interviews with clients sampled by outcome: approved, declined, withdrawn, and the ones who never applied at all
- Teach-back sessions on live facilities: can the client explain what they agreed, what it costs, and what happens if rates move
- Journey and blueprint workshops with mixed groups of bankers and business stakeholders, because alignment built in the room outlasts a report
- A future-state service concept for the financing journey, with the state model at its centre
You get: a future-state blueprint, a tested state model, and the discouraged-borrower question answered for the first time.
Ship the state model, then the decline
A concept that does not ship is a nice deck. Landing is part of the method, not the afterthought.
- Visible state in the client journey: stage, holder, expected date, updated on change rather than on request
- The decline redesigned: reason, remedy, route, alternatives
- The banker-facing view of the same state, so staff stop apologising for a process they cannot see either
- Design principles and patterns written into the Chapter’s system, so the next domain does not start from zero
You get: two shipped changes inside the first year, measured, and a written definition of what good looks like in this domain.
The method mix, and why each one is there
No single method answers a question this size. Each covers a specific weakness in the others, and naming the weakness is the part that usually gets skipped.
The whole journey across client, front stage and back stage, with every handoff named. The only method that shows you where the silence comes from.
Shows the process as designed, not always as performed. Needs walking, not just workshopping.Entrepreneurs sampled by outcome, including declines and withdrawals. Tells you what they believed was happening and what they decided as a result.
Small n and reconstructive memory. Explains the numbers, cannot replace them.Support contacts joined to journey stage. Tells you how often, where, and at what cost, at full scale.
Blind to the client who never called and quietly went elsewhere.Bankers and business stakeholders in one room building the map together. Alignment made in the room survives contact with a roadmap.
Produces consensus, which is not the same as truth. Needs evidence in the room with it.Ask a client to explain their own facility back. The cheapest possible early warning, and the one thing that would have caught the derivatives problem.
Uncomfortable for everyone involved, which is exactly why it is not currently done.The application and manage-facility flows, observed, including with assistive technology. Tells you exactly where the task breaks.
Artificial stakes. Nobody in a session is waiting on the money to make payroll.The hypotheses I would test first
Six, drawn from the public evidence, each with the signal that would confirm it, the method that would test it, and what would have to move for a fix to count. This is the table I would want to be wrong about by week eight.
| Hypothesised driver | What you would see | How I would test it | What has to move |
|---|---|---|---|
| Silence, not slowness | Contact volume spiking in the two stages with no client-facing update, not in the longest stage. | Contact records joined to journey stage, plus depth interviews. | Avoidable status contacts per hundred applications. |
| Handoffs create the repetition | Clients re-explaining their business at each internal transfer. | Blueprint walk plus transcript coding. | Number of times a client restates their case per application. |
| Declines end relationships | Declined clients not returning, and not banking elsewhere with you either. | Outcome-sampled interviews and retention analysis after decline. | Retained relationships twelve months after a no. |
| Discouragement is large | Businesses that considered financing and never applied, for reasons about the process rather than the money. | Survey of business clients who did not apply, plus adviser interviews. | Applications from viable businesses that previously self-excluded. |
| Comprehension is assumed | Clients unable to explain their own facility terms accurately. | Teach-back sessions on live facilities. | Accuracy of client explanation before signature. |
| Bankers are stuck too | Staff unable to answer a status question without chasing internally themselves. | Shadowing and interviews with account bankers. | Time for a banker to answer “where is my application”. |
Five ongoing practices
A project answers one question. These are the loops that make the second question cheaper than the first, and that let the work continue without everything routing through me.
Practice 01
The blueprint stays alive
A blueprint that is drawn once and framed is decoration. This one gets revisited every quarter with the people who run the process, so it stays a description of reality rather than of a workshop held in March.
YOU GET → one shared picture of the journey that product, credit and design all argue from.Practice 02
Continuous contact with entrepreneurs
A standing slot of sessions that anyone in the domain can attend, deliberately including clients you turned down. Watching one entrepreneur explain what they thought was happening changes more minds than any deck.
YOU GET → stakeholders arguing from evidence rather than from preference, and advocacy that does not live only with me.Practice 03
Coaching, not managing
The brief asks for someone who raises design maturity across teams. I do that by critique against a written standard, so a junior designer can win the argument, and by pairing on the hard half of a problem while leaving the work in their hands.
YOU GET → strategic design decisions made in rooms I am not in, which is the only version that scales.Practice 04
The uncertainty measure
How long a client has been waiting without knowing anything, split by stage. Nobody currently owns this number. Once it exists it changes what people argue about, because it separates the time a decision needs from the silence around it.
YOU GET → a number that makes the case for this work without me having to make it.Practice 05
Method development
One new tool or mixed method per quarter, run on a live question, with an honest written verdict on whether it earned its place. Including where AI-assisted analysis holds up and where it invents a pattern that is not in the data.
YOU GET → four written verdicts a year, and a Chapter adopting methods on evidence rather than enthusiasm.Practice 06
Narratives that travel
One page per problem area: what we are optimising for, what we are deliberately not, and what would change our minds. Written before the work rather than reverse-engineered after it, so a team can move without waiting for me.
YOU GET → speed and coherence at the same time, instead of a queue outside my calendar.How you would know it is working
Five measures. The first is the one I would insist on, because it is the only one that tests the actual argument.
- 01
Time spent waiting without knowing anything
Split by stage, reported monthly beside conversion. It separates the time a decision genuinely needs from the silence around it. If this does not fall, nothing else on this page mattered.
- 02
Avoidable status contacts
Calls and messages that exist only because the journey did not tell someone where they were. Not total contacts, which can be reduced by making it harder to reach you, which is worse.
- 03
Relationships retained after a decline
The measure nobody keeps. A no that leaves the entrepreneur intact and willing to come back is worth more over a decade than a marginal yes.
- 04
Decisions changed, not studies delivered
How often a finding altered what a team built, versus confirmed what had already been decided. The only honest measure of whether design is influencing or decorating.
- 05
Design decisions made without me
Coaching works when the standard gets applied in rooms I am not in. If every judgement call still routes through me at month twelve, I have been a bottleneck with a nice title.
The thing I actually care about
I have spent six years turning research into things teams can act on the same week, in two-hour sessions with product owners, developers and business analysts who did not commission the work and did not have to agree with it. What I care about is not the blueprint. It is the moment someone changes their mind because they finally saw what a person was actually trying to do. In this domain that person is running a business and waiting on you, which makes it matter more than usual.
Method, and what to distrust
Sources used
- Review corpora: Trustpilot for rabobank.nl, and the Dutch complaints platform klacht.nl.
- De Nederlandsche Bank on business customers refused a bank relationship, and the share of those refusals with a compliance ground.
- Dutch trade reporting on business account onboarding times and the due-diligence costs passed to entrepreneurs.
- The public record on SME interest-rate derivatives: the AFM reassessment, the uniform recovery framework, and Rabobank’s own provisioning.
- Role context: your Senior Experience Designer, Business Lending advert, and what it says about the Design Chapter.
- Frameworks: Doblin’s Ten Types of Innovation, and Roger Martin on integrative thinking.
Known biases and limits
- Trustpilot self-selects for grievance. A 1.4 measures how bad the worst experiences are and how motivated people are to record them. It is not a satisfaction score and I have not used it as one.
- Most public reviews are retail, not business lending. I have marked which findings come from business customers specifically. The rest set the expectation an entrepreneur arrives with, which matters, but it is weaker evidence.
- The klacht.nl resolution rate may be an artefact. A zero per cent figure probably says as much about the platform as the bank. I have flagged it as a question rather than a finding.
- The derivatives file is historic and was remediated. I include it because of what it teaches about comprehension, not to relitigate it. Treating it as a current failure would be unfair and wrong.
- The DNB refusal figure is sector-wide. It describes Dutch banks, not Rabobank. I have not split it because the public data does not.
- I have not seen the journey. It sits behind authentication. No walkthrough, no scan, no audit. Every claim about the process is inferred from what customers describe.
- This is outside-in work. No internal research, no roadmap, no constraints, and no idea what the Chapter has already found. Two weeks inside would sharpen or kill most of it, and the fourth path is written on that assumption.
Sources
- Trustpilot: Rabobank
- klacht.nl: complaints about Rabobank
- Compliance costs, waiting times and the business account as a strategic choice
- Rijksoverheid: what to do when a bank refuses a business account
- banken.nl: Rabobank and the SME interest-derivative recovery framework
- Rabobank: reassessment of interest rate derivatives
- OECD: Financing SMEs and Entrepreneurs, Netherlands
- Doblin: Ten Types of Innovation
- Roger Martin: The Opposable Mind (integrative thinking)
Key responsibilities
“Comfortable working in ambiguity.”
That sentence is why I applied.
Your brief asks for someone who operates confidently in ambiguous environments and helps teams move from uncertainty to clarity. I have a drawing about that. It is on every site I build and it has been the shape of my working life for twelve years: everything at once on the left, one line a team can build on the right.
And I am happiest at the left-hand end. Most designers are drawn to the clean line. I like the knot: the contradictions, the six stakeholders who each own one piece, the research that refuses to agree with itself. Below, each responsibility with what I bring and what you would actually have in your hands.
Key responsibilities
Your three headline duties and six responsibilities, grouped into what they are really asking for. Each one gets what I bring and a deliverable with a date on it.
What you have by month twelve
Before the detail, the whole thing on one line each. This is what I would expect to be held to.
| When | What lands | How you check it |
|---|---|---|
| Weeks 1–8 | Current-state service blueprint across client, banker and back office, with every handoff and silence marked and sized. | One picture the domain lead, an architect and a credit officer all recognise as true. |
| Quarter 1 | The uncertainty measure built and reported: how long clients wait without knowing anything, by stage. | A number that did not exist before, sitting beside conversion in the domain review. |
| Quarter 2 | Future-state service concept with the state model at its centre, tested with clients including declined ones. | Entrepreneurs can describe what would happen to them. Today they cannot. |
| Quarter 2–3 | Visible state shipped in the client journey, plus the banker-facing view of the same thing. | Status calls fall. Bankers stop chasing internally to answer a simple question. |
| Quarter 3–4 | The decline redesigned: reason, remedy, route, alternatives. Comprehension teach-back piloted before signature. | Relationships retained after a no, measured for the first time. |
| Throughout | Weekly critique with written outcomes, pairing, and one-page design directions per problem area. | Strategic design calls being made in rooms I am not in. |
How my time splits
Commitments only mean something if they total one hundred. This is my whole capacity as a senior designer who stays hands-on, and what happens when a programme is in the field.
Steady state
40 · 30 · 20 · 10 = 100
A fifth on facilitation is deliberate. In an organisation this size, alignment is not overhead around the work, it is most of how the work actually happens.
Programme in the field
30 · 45 · 20 · 5 = 100
Research takes the load and I say so in advance rather than quietly missing something else. Coaching is the first thing squeezed and the first thing I put back.
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01
Drive the strategic direction of business lending journeys
The duty. Explore customer needs, identify opportunities, frame complex problems, and translate insights into service concepts and future-state experiences.
What I bring. A worked example, already written. The first tab frames the problem as silence rather than slowness, ranks four root causes by what a designer can move, and turns them into a future-state concept with the state model at its centre. It is built entirely from public sources, which is the hardest version of the exercise.
YOU GET → current-state blueprint by week 8, future-state concept tested with clients by quarter 2. -
02
Operate confidently in ambiguous environments and bring structure to complexity
The duty. Help stakeholders align on priorities, opportunities and design challenges.
What I bring. This is the thing I am best at and the reason I applied. Six years at Baymard is essentially the same task on repeat: arrive at an unfamiliar product with fifty competing problems, work out which few actually matter, and get a room of people who did not commission the work to agree on an order. I do not find ambiguity uncomfortable. I find the rush out of it uncomfortable, which is a more useful instinct in a domain like this.
YOU GET → a ranked set of opportunities with the reasoning attached, not a list of everything wrong. -
03
Analyse end-to-end journeys, workflows and service ecosystems
The duty. Create scalable solutions balancing customer value, business objectives and operational realities, using service design methods, systems thinking and journey mapping to find root causes.
What I bring. My earliest work was exactly this: ethnographic research across the Western Cape translated into government services for rural communities, where the operational reality was the constraint on everything. Since then, six years of taking whole products apart and mapping where tasks break. The journey tab is that method applied to your financing journey from the outside, with the six break points marked.
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04
Work with domain leads, strategists, architects and business stakeholders
The duty. Translate business goals and customer needs into service strategies. Facilitate workshops, align diverse groups and influence decisions even when priorities differ.
What I bring. Six years of delivering findings to product owners, developers and business analysts who did not commission the work and were free to disagree. Facilitation is the thing I have been thanked for most often, by clients and colleagues both. What works is not conviction, it is bringing the evidence and the design together so agreeing is the easy option.
YOU GET → 20% of capacity protected for facilitation and alignment, budgeted rather than borrowed. -
05
Turn research and requirements into compelling visions and clear narratives
The duty. Articulate clear narratives and turn insights into actionable outcomes.
What I bring. I thrive in presentation mode and I love talking about complexity in a way that gets everyone invested. Alongside that I genuinely enjoy the writing: documentation, reports and pitches. This document is the sample. You are reading how I would present to your domain.
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06
Act as a design leader and connector, coaching others
The duty. Bring people together, coach others, and strengthen design maturity across teams and the wider organisation.
What I bring. I have raised the bar in people I did not manage for my whole career. In three companies I was the first or second designer: I built the process, hired the team, and hired two managers who went on to lead product design. The method is unglamorous. Critique against a written standard so a junior designer can win the argument, pairing on the hard half, and a written decision each time so we do not re-run the debate in a fortnight.
YOU GET → weekly critique with a searchable decision log, and design calls made without me. -
07
Collaborate closely with other designers, discovery through implementation
The duty. Work alongside designers across the whole process rather than handing over at the edges.
What I bring. A front-end background that never went away, HTML, CSS and PHP, and enough current curiosity to tell when a technical constraint is real and when it is a preference. That is most of what makes a strategic designer bearable to work with downstream, because it stops the concept being something nobody can build.
Three things you would otherwise have to ask me
Utrecht, hybrid. I live in Dieren in Gelderland. It is a direct train and I have thought about it properly rather than optimistically. Two to three days works well. Five would not, and I would rather set that expectation now than in month two.
Dutch. Your advert says English is the working language and Dutch is a plus. I have some Dutch and I am actively learning, helped by growing up South African with Afrikaans around me, which comes from Dutch. Reading it is comfortable. Facilitating a workshop in it is not yet, and I would rather tell you that than find out together in month three.
No visa needed. I already live and work in the Netherlands.
Your talent
You asked for ten years.
Here is the actual count.
Nine requirements on your list. Seven are a straight yes, two are honest works in progress, and all nine are answered line by line below with the evidence attached rather than the adjective.
Your talent
Your talent points, line by line. Most are a yes. Two are honest works in progress, and both are in the table rather than hidden after it.
The list, line by line
Nine requirements. Read the two that are not a straight yes first, because they are the ones that should decide whether this is worth your time.
| Requirement | What I hold | The evidence |
|---|---|---|
| 10+ years in service or strategic design | Yes | Sixteen years in digital since 2010, twelve in product and research. Service design work began at the Western Cape Government in 2014 |
| Ownership of complex initiatives, discovery to implementation | Yes | Every Baymard engagement is mine end to end: scope, method, execution, analysis, delivery, then implementation calls with the team that has to build it |
| Leading design efforts, coaching and mentoring designers | Yes | First or second designer at three companies. Built the process, hired the teams, and hired two managers who became heads of product design |
| Working with a broad stakeholder landscape | Yes | Two-hour deep dives with product owners, developers, analysts and Director-level stakeholders who did not commission the work |
| Research facilitation and journey mapping | Yes | Certified Design Thinking Facilitator and Usability Analyst, Human Factors International. Ethnographic fieldwork, journey mapping and workshop facilitation throughout |
| Service blueprinting | Partly | I map journeys and service ecosystems constantly, and I have blueprinted across front and back stage, but not at the scale of a bank’s lending chain: see the gap below |
| Systems thinking across customer, business and operations | Yes | MPhil in Inclusive Innovation for Information Technology, UCT. Designing government services under real operational constraint is where I learned this |
| Evidence-based decisions and momentum through storytelling | Yes | Up to 50 prioritised recommendations per engagement, each with a mockup, ranked by impact so a team knows what to do first |
| Professional English; Dutch a plus | English yes, Dutch building | Fluent English, confident presenting and facilitating at any level. Some Dutch and actively learning, with a head start from Afrikaans: see below |
Said plainly, because you will find out anyway
Dutch. Your advert lists it as a plus and English as the working language. I have some Dutch and I am actively learning. I also have a head start that is worth naming: I am South African, I grew up with Afrikaans around me, and Afrikaans comes from Dutch. Written Dutch is far from foreign to me and the sound of the language was in my ear long before I moved here in 2022.
What I would not claim yet is that I could facilitate a workshop with Dutch entrepreneurs unsupported. I am closer to that than most people arriving from outside, and I would rather show you where I actually am than either overstate it or write myself off. In the meantime I would take the sessions that work in English, pair on the ones that do not, and keep going.
Blueprinting at bank scale. I map journeys and service ecosystems as a matter of course, and the journey tab is a blueprint. But I have not blueprinted a service chain with six internal owners, a credit committee and a regulator in it. The method transfers. The scale and the politics are something I would be learning in the first quarter, with a lot of listening in it.
Where I learned service design properly
At the Western Cape Government I did ethnographic research across the province and translated it into digital services for rural communities: document services, home and business applications. The whole job was designing for people the system was not built for, under operational constraints nobody could change. My MPhil at UCT was on the same question. It is also why a lending journey that excludes people quietly is the kind of problem I find hard to leave alone.
And where I learned financial services
Allan Gray, where I designed the private investor platform and was the first designer at the company. Then Luno, leading design strategy across onboarding, payments and security as the second designer hired, helping grow the team to seven and acting as product manager across several agile teams. Both were regulated, both were complex, and both taught me that the compliance constraint is usually real and the process around it usually is not.
Leading change by getting everyone on the same page
With a track record of leading organisational change, I have been described as incredibly inspiring and optimistic. I have a natural ability to reverberate keenness, and I am always seeking how we can all be on the same page and maintain absolute clarity around our goal posts.
I still read the code
I have a history of front-end development: HTML, CSS and PHP, and the new possibilities now available to us are just the start. I am keeping a close and very geeky eye on all the new realms as our industry evolves further. It is also why I can tell when a technical constraint is real and when it is a preference.
Where you can see the skill in this document
Design strategies takes three of your tensions and refuses to pick a side: speed versus proper assessment, standardising versus knowing the business, and the customer versus the banker. Each resolves into a position that keeps both. That section is my argument, not a summary of someone else’s.
Why it produced this research
Rabobank is one of the most trusted institutions in Dutch business life and sits at 1.4 on Trustpilot. Most readings pick a side. I hold both: the institution is trusted and the process is not, and the distance between those two things is the entire design opportunity in this domain.
Get to know the human behind all this
Irani
Sangham
Human on planet Earth, mother, and a terrible pun pusher.
Get to know the human behind all this
A little about me that has nothing to do with design.
South Africa to the Netherlands, via a great deal of learning
I was born and raised in South Africa. On weekends I was either hiking the wild mountains or surfing in the ocean.
In 2022 my husband and I moved to the Netherlands. He got a job here, so we decided to give it a try, and I was six months pregnant with my son at the time. Navigating a country move while pregnant is no small feat.
I have two children, and life since has been full of learning new things and upskilling incredibly quickly, in a completely new country, on the literal other side of the planet from my familiar environment and support system. It has been the most difficult and challenging time, but I have enjoyed making every day just a little bit easier by consistently trying my best, and those skills are directly transferable to this role.
I know what it is to be new to a system
I moved to the Netherlands in 2022, six months pregnant, and set up a life inside institutions I did not yet understand. Banks, registrations, forms, and a lot of waiting without knowing what was happening. Afrikaans gave me a head start on the language, which turns out to help far less than you would hope when the process itself is the confusing part. It is not the same as running a business here, but it is the closest I have come to being the person on the other side of a system designed by people who already know how it works.
Fun to have around, allegedly
I have been told I am very fun to have around and that I have a knack for making people laugh. I do love a good and bad joke, and I have disastrous puns, but I am not sorry about that.
I chose depth of craft over headcount, on purpose
You will notice I have not held roles titled manager or director. That is deliberate, and it is not a gap. For most of my career I steered towards depth of craft rather than headcount: being the person who does the work, sets the bar and brings others up to it, rather than the person who owns the org chart. Six years ago I made it explicit and moved into a consultative role, where the whole job is holding a standard and persuading people who do not report to me to meet it.
Which is why your brief reads well to me. It asks for a design leader and connector who coaches others and raises design maturity, and it does not ask me to manage them. I have still built teams, hired designers, and hired two managers who went on to lead product design. I just never wanted the org chart, and influence without authority is the only way I have ever worked.
Some things I like
Competitive swimming
As a child my goal was the Olympics. I trained four hours a day and represented my country on numerous occasions, from age eight to fourteen.
Shaolin Kung Fu
From fourteen, I trained for fifteen years. I taught it, and competed for South Africa.
Ambidextrous, and juggling
Balls, and life. Both ongoing.
Coffee, and sourdough
A long-standing coffee nerd, and recently obsessed with sourdough and its many applications.
The growing brain
A lot of my time goes into toddler activities and investigations at the moment. The growing brain is fascinating to me.
Mountains and ocean
Hiking and surfing were the shape of every South African weekend, and the habit has not left.
Testimonials
She earned the complete trust of my entire team.
Lauren Hunt · on working together at Luno
Four colleagues and two clients, on what it is actually like when I am in the room.
Irani has had a massive impact on my career as a product designer. She has always made time to give me advice, resources and guidance to further my career, and continues to do so. She inspires through being extremely knowledgeable and capable while remaining immensely humble. She earned the complete trust of my entire team at Luno, and I would jump at the opportunity to work with her again.
Irani is very good at holding complexity and clarity, opposing points of tension, in her head simultaneously. She can empathise with the user and understand the problem while recommending a simple solution for the team to implement.
Irani, thank you for making an incomparable difference. You are an integral part of the team and possess a quiet composure, low-key witticism (and a vast supply of puns), and a warmth that makes it a pleasure to work with you. Not only that, but over time you have improved the work flow of the team by continually coming up with clever, innovative ideas.
Kudos going straight to Irani for organising an awesome summit. Practical, insightful, kept to schedule and beautifully facilitated.
Irani has made accessibility tangible and actionable for us. We have a clear list of where to start, removing the confusion and overwhelm. Thank you, Irani.
Irani has an exceptional ability to hold a room and get people to be productive. I felt like I had ideas flowing, and that any idea I put down was a good contribution. Great facilitation and run-through of our product improvement possibilities.