CIBC Product Bundling

A first of its kind experience for students to start their financial journey, quickly and easily.

The CIBC Best Student Life Bundle is a market-first experience allowing students to apply for a chequing account, savings, and credit card in one seamless flow. By balancing complex legal requirements with intuitive design, we transformed a long, fragmented process into Canada’s first unified product onboarding journey.

This award-winning flow launched as a new industry standard for digital acquisition.

We began with 4 workshops with stakeholders and teammates, which provided early direction and alignment.

Over four days of collaborative workshops, we moved from high-level goals to a prioritized feature set:
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🎯 Day 1: Goals & Distractors
We focused on building long-term student relationships from day one, intentionally bypassing existing clients to prioritize new banking relationships.

📉 Day 2: Current State Pain Points
Fragmented, repetitive applications caused high drop-off. Students also struggled to navigate unintuitive forms or identify the right products for financial success.
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💡 Day 3: Feature Ideation
We conceptualized features and inclusions across four key phases: Discovery, Product Selection (choosing specific accounts/cards), Application, and Final Confirmation.
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✅ Day 4: Feature Prioritization
We filtered ideas down to focus on the highest-impact features, ensuring the final flow solved the most critical friction points for new-to-bank students.

These workshops enabled us to align with stakeholders and cross-functional teammates, providing a clear, strategic foundation to move into design exploration.

We made high level flows, journey maps, and lo-fi wireframes around domestic and international students.

It made the most sense to target students first, since they'd likely require multiple products to begin their banking journey.

The flow focused on 4 major inclusions:

📱 Social Media Entry Point
We collaborated on an Instagram-native entry point, utilizing motion design to capture student attention.

🏠 Landing Page
Users land on a dedicated page that distills the "Best Student Life Bundle" value proposition, clearly detailing product descriptions and benefits of the bundle.
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🛍️ Product Selector
A streamlined interface where students can customize their bundle, choosing between various chequing accounts and credit cards that fit their specific financial needs.

📝 Application & Results
An intuitive, unified form that collects all necessary data in one go, ending with a clear confirmation and immediate next steps for their new banking relationship.

Designing for both domestic and international students required a tailored approach to address their distinct financial needs.

This iterative wireframing and testing process ensured the final flow felt intuitive and supportive, providing a solid blueprint before we moved into high-fidelity design.

Usability testing provided direction, and clarity for key design decisions.

To gauge interest and usability, we built two functional prototypes for moderated usability testing sessions via UserTesting, focusing on two distinct areas:
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🔍 Discovery & Product Selection
We tested the landing page and bundle selection to gauge understanding and ease before users entered the application.

‍Users immediately recognized the value of the "bundle" over solo products, noting that the intuitive information hierarchy made student-specific perks the primary driver for entering the flow.
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‍📝 Application & Results
We gathered feedback on the actual process to ensure the transition from selection to submission was frictionless.

Participants heavily preferred the segmented, multi-step approach over legacy "one long page" forms because it felt considerably faster, and less overwhelming. They also cited the shopping cart and progress bar as key features that provided status and security.


By validating our designs with users, we proved the success of the bundling model. Notably, the transition to a segmented application was so successful that it reshaped how CIBC handles digital applications across the entire bank, even outside this project.

Cross-functional alignment balanced our vision with technical and legal realities.

Before moving into development, we conducted a series of critical reviews to balance our "ideal" student experience with the realities of a highly regulated banking environment.

📣 Marketing & Brand
We collaborated closely with Marketing to nail the bundle’s market appeal, successfully acquiring a dedicated name (The Best Student Life Bundle) and high-quality assets.

‍⚖️ Governance & Legal
I facilitated deep-dive reviews with Legal and Privacy teams to ensure our simplified flow met strict regulatory requirements without sacrificing the user-centric "bundle" concept.

‍🛠️ Feasibility & Costing
‍Technical Feasibility Reviews mapped out the complex logic required to capture all necessary data for three products at once, while cost estimates ensured we stayed within a specific budget.

A collaborative launch earned industry recognition as a 2-time award winner.

We maintained a tight feedback loop with Front-end, Back-end, QA, and Legal to ensure a frictionless transition from design to live product, maintaining the "bundle" integrity through every technical constraint.

🏆 Industry Accolades
The project’s success in redefining the student journey was recognized by the Global Banking & Finance Review® with two major honors: Best Bank for Youth and Students Canada 2025, and Excellence in Innovation: Student Banking Canada 2025

📈 The Blueprint for Success
By validating the "segmented application" model, this project didn't just win awards—it became the official design standard for all digital applications across CIBC.