Design Concept · CIBC Mobile Banking
Reimagining mobile banking search as an AI-powered conversational guide, turning the app from a passive record of transactions into a tool that actively helps users understand their finances.
01 · Challenge
The CIBC app surfaces useful information like spending comparisons, budget alerts, and account summaries, but delivers it all in a chronological feed. Valuable insights get pushed down by low-priority notifications before users ever see them.
The question was how to make a user's financial data instantly accessible without rebuilding the whole app.
Current Advice tab
02 · Problem
Spending comparisons and budget alerts were lost in a chronological feed alongside low-priority notifications. Search was limited to articles, leaving users with no way to ask a direct question or surface a past insight. Valuable data was in the system, but there was no way to actively retrieve it.
The Insights tab showing a monthly spend comparison, one of many valuable data points buried deep in the feed
03 · Research
I looked at how leading companies like YouTube and Reddit are integrating generative AI. The best AI experiences are context-aware, guided, and action-oriented, surfacing what users need rather than waiting to be asked. That became the brief for Smart Search.
AI-powered search across Grok, Reddit Answers, and YouTube, each pairing a natural language input with a guided, contextual response
04 · Solution
Smart Search is a new AI-powered hub that sits on top of the existing Insights engine, turning the experience from a passive feed into an interactive guide. Users type a question in plain language and get back a structured answer drawn from their own data.
Every response is layered: a summary at the top, supporting data below, and a suggested action at the bottom, closing the loop between awareness and doing something about it.
Smart Search home with guided prompt suggestions
A conversational response with supporting data and a suggested next step
05 · Reflections
This project reinforced that great design is not always about adding something new. The data was already in the system. Introducing a conversational search layer shifts the app from a place where users passively receive information to one where they can actively seek it out and take control.