First Hawaiian Bank

The Client

First Hawaiian, Inc. is a bank holding company headquartered in Honolulu, Hawaii. Its principal subsidiary, First Hawaiian Bank, founded in 1858 under the name Bishop & Company, is Hawaii’s oldest and largest financial institution with branch locations throughout Hawaii, Guam, and Saipan. The company offers a comprehensive suite of banking services to consumer and commercial customers, including deposit products, loans, wealth management, insurance, trust, retirement planning, credit card, and merchant processing services. 

The Situation

Personalizing digital customer experience has long been overdue in industries with little distinction. The fact that 87% of banking customers who increased their use of digital channels during the pandemic intended to continue doing so post-shutdown revealed a clear business imperative for First Hawaiian Bank (FHB). FHB had started the process by implementing Acquia Cloud Platform, Acquia Site Studio, and Acquia Personalization technologies but needed financial services experts to help maximize its ROI.

The Challenge

FHB’s aim was to reimagine and reshape the digital experience to be customer-centric, while still meeting business objectives like new account growth. Because of its location, FHB had to meet the needs of both locals and international business visitors. Additionally, FHB’s in-house team was not staffed to handle the technical requirements of a new web platform.

The Solution

Working with information technology partner CI&T, the companies kicked off the project by unifying 70+ internal stakeholders. CI&T then helped identify personas and devised a strategy to improve connections with each persona through context-appropriate content. 

CI&T’s process, combined with the low-code nature of Acquia Site Studio meant that a minimum viable product (MVP) was completed in just three months, and then the full Drupal site launched just under seven months later. Because the MVP was completed quickly, the rest of the transformational process had executive buy-in and support. CI&T laid the groundwork for the in-house team to handle ongoing site optimization, working with them to promote understanding throughout the process. To manage and evolve FHB's digital customer experience, CI&T proposed new business and technology roles.

The Results

Instead of a typical two year cycle, the teams delivered the full website in under 10 months using an agile sprint model and Acquia’s low-code Site Studio solution. The new site's metrics show success, with a 50% decrease in bouncerate and a 29% increase in time spent per session.