Your customers deserve a better future.

Most “big ideas” in financial services still start in the wrong place.

A new product.

A revenue target.

A channel someone saw in a trend report.

When we work with Client teams, we encourage them to stop starting with tactics, and instead start with a vivid, future-state picture of what it should feel like to be your customer—from the first moment they notice you to the point where they’d confidently recommend you.

That’s what a target state vision is, and it will help you to create smarter, braver work in financial services.

In Finsights, Shiny’s proprietary study of U.S. adults, we consistently heard that people are juggling real money stress while trying to make sense of increasingly complex options. A future-state vision is how you make sure your “breakthrough ideas” actually help your prospect and customers navigate that reality—and give you a roadmap for how to continue building on that for years to come.

Envision the customer experience, not just the tactics

Target state visioning is essentially a disciplined strategic “imagine if” exercise. Instead of documenting how things work today, you map the ideal experience your financial services brand could deliver to help your customers. In short, it’s about creating a future-state journey that visualizes the desired customer experience end to end and guides strategic improvements to close the gap between today and that ideal target state.

In a financial services context, that means you don’t start with “We need a checking acquisition campaign.” You start with:

– A specific customer (for example, someone who feels behind on their finances but wants to do better this year).

– A specific journey (say, moving their everyday banking to you).

– A narrative that maps how they move from first awareness, through onboarding, to deepening.

– Or simply a business goal: how can we create a best-in-class acquisitions journey to drive our five-year growth target?

Then every idea—email, direct mail, landing page, in-branch experience, app flow—has to earn its place in that story. You’re no longer approving isolated tactics; you’re building a cohesive experience customers can actually feel, and that all of your company’s cross functional teams understand and can build towards.

Spark meaningful internal discussions

The real magic of future-state work isn’t the document at the end; it’s the conversations it forces along the way.

When you walk your leadership team through a “day in the life” scenario—what a stressed prospect sees, clicks, and feels as they move from awareness to becoming a loyal cardholder—you demonstrate what your customers actually crave: clarity, convenience, guidance that doesn’t talk down to them. Then when you compare the target state to your current experience the internal team starts to ask different questions, like:

“Where are we accidentally adding anxiety?”

“What would it look like to reassure them sooner?”

“Are we designing this step around our process, or their confidence?”

That’s exactly the kind of friction you want to uncover inside the building, before you spend a dollar in-market.

Research on emotion and loyalty in banking backs up the importance of building for customer needs to drive business results. A large consumer study reported in The Financial Brand found that emotional connection—feeling understood and valued—can be a stronger driver of loyalty than basic satisfaction alone. More recent loyalty research shows emotional connection can multiply visit and purchase behavior, dramatically increasing the impact of customer programs. Centering your internal discussions around the target state vision of what you brand should be delivering to meet your customers’ needs is a way to ensure you capitalize on these insights.

Keep it adaptable to real constraints

I’m a realist. We don’t live in a world of unlimited budget and unconstrained tech stacks.

A good target-state vision acknowledges that. You dream big first, then adapt that vision to reality without losing the parts that matter most to customers. In practice, that might look like:

– Defining an “ideal” multi-year experience for a priority product.

– Identifying which pieces you can build this year, within existing systems.

– Including bolder ideas in a clear roadmap instead of letting them die in a deck.

The vision stays intact. The implementation gets phased. The constant is the question: “What version of this actually serves our audience best right now?”

Why this approach matters

Three reasons a target state vision can be a powerful tool for your financial services brand:

1. Challenges outdated thinking. Future-state work deliberately removes the blinders of “we can’t” and “we’ve always done it this way.” Instead of asking, “What can we do with this quarter’s budget?” you ask, “What would excite and help customers if we weren’t constrained?” That often surfaces ideas that are more about reducing friction and building trust than about shouting louder.
2. Maintains realistic business priorities. This isn’t an invitation to chase every new idea; in fact it’s the opposite. When you ground your target state in customer and business outcomes, you prioritize the parts of the experience that move the needle. As McKinsey’s banking-specific research reported, banks that are frontrunners in customer satisfaction tend to outperform on growth, total shareholder return, and cost efficiency.
3. Centers on your audience. Most importantly, a target-state vision forces you to visualize campaigns across channels as one coherent experience that solves real customer needs. That’s the bar, not “Did we launch a campaign?” but “Does this actually help the person achieve their goals?”

When your financial services brand lives in a highly cluttered category, this is how you stand out—not with another product feature, but in a customer-centric future your customers can see themselves.