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Beyond Bank Eyes 67% More Home Loans with Experimentation
For a customer-owned bank, the digital experience has to feel as personal as the relationship. But when Tonina Iannicelli, Head of Digital at Beyond Bank, started looking at the platform underpinning that experience, the reality didn't match the ambition. The existing CMS was expensive to operate, slow to change, and lacked the innovation needed to deliver on the bank's core strategy: being the best relationship bank in Australia.
Beyond Bank needed a foundation that could support personalization, experimentation, and a data-driven operating rhythm — so they built one with Optimizely. Starting with CMS, then layering on ODP, Content Recommendations, and Web Experimentation, Tonina and her team took a deliberate, step-by-step approach — getting the foundation right before expanding.
The payoff has been significant. A single experiment shifting from product-led to customer-intent-led navigation delivered a projected 67% uplift in home loan applications — paying for the cost of the platform within the first couple of months. Beyond the metrics, experimentation has changed the culture: what was once a big-investment, hope-for-the-best approach is now a low-risk, data-backed way to validate ideas across campaigns, content, and digital journeys.
Now, with Opal AI entering the picture — using Figma designs to code up experiment variations and generate test ideas — Beyond Bank is accelerating further. As Tonina puts it, the approach is simple: don't bite off too much, get your foundation right, and then add to it.
The Bank for Relationships, and the Platform to Match
- Tonina started her career as a programmer before moving into digital leadership — combining her love of technology with her strengths in people and process, which shapes how she runs Beyond Bank's digital team today
- Beyond Bank measures success across two dimensions: customer engagement and experience on one side, and direct contribution to the business on the other — from new account registrations and savings to getting customers into homes through funded loans
- The team works with partner Orchard to run a data benchmarking dashboard that tracks these KPIs monthly, ensuring every digital decision is grounded in measurable outcomes rather than gut feel
Why the Old Platform Couldn't Keep Up
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- The previous platform was costly to operate, slow to deploy changes, and difficult to integrate — requiring more staff to maintain it, with no clear path to the innovation Beyond Bank needed
- Personalization was a key gap — as a relationship-first bank, Beyond Bank needed a platform that could support personalised digital experiences, not just serve static content
- A clear north star drove the search for Optimizely: find something that would enable Beyond Bank to be the best relationship bank, not just the most digitally functional one
Building a Culture of Experimentation in a Risk-Averse Industry
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- Experimentation was always on Beyond Bank's roadmap — as a member-based organisation, personalising the customer journey was never optional, but it required getting the CMS foundation right first before layering on A/B testing and personalisation
- Tonina flips the narrative on risk: in a traditionally conservative industry, experimentation is actually the more cautious approach — it's a small, low-cost way to validate a hypothesis before committing to a big investment that might be wrong
- The team now tests across campaigns, content, and headlines — not just the digital experience — using data to validate or challenge ideas rather than relying on opinion
It's actually quite a small thing to do, to test and see whether something's gonna work. So it's not the big investment that would be required years ago. This is just such an easy way to test is our vision or is our concept, or is our hypothesis, worth it.
Tonina Iannicelli — Head of Digital
From Product-Led to Customer-Led — and 67% More Applications
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- Beyond Bank had historically been product-led in how it presented its digital experience — but that didn't match its customer-first strategy, so the team tested shifting the navigation from product categories to customer intent, like "first home buyer"
- The experiment delivered a projected 67% annualised uplift in home loan applications, paying for the cost of the platform within the first couple of months
- Critically, the team measures impact through the full funnel — not just website visits or submissions, but funded loans — which unites front office and back office around the same outcomes and gives leadership the metrics they actually care about
Opal, Figma, and the Advice to Start Small
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- Beyond Bank sees AI as a partner — extra knowledge and efficiency that's simply a given for modern digital teams — and has started using Opal with a deliberate "start slow, start small" approach
- The team is using Figma to design experiment variations outside their design system, then leveraging Opal to code them up — skipping the manual developer step entirely and accelerating how quickly they can get tests live
- Tonina's advice to peers in financial services: don't bite off too much — Optimizely has all the tools, but get your foundation right first, build your operating rhythm, and add to it over time so you can actually get your ROI
Foundation First, Then Everything Else
Tonina Iannicelli's approach at Beyond Bank is a masterclass in disciplined digital transformation. Rather than trying to do everything at once, the team laid the CMS foundation first, built their operating rhythm, then layered on experimentation, personalisation, and ODP — proving value at each stage before expanding.
That patience has paid off. A single experiment shifting from product-led to customer-intent-led navigation is projecting a 67% uplift in home loan applications — and it's not just a conversion metric. It's more people getting into homes, which is exactly what a customer-owned bank exists to do.
Now, with Opal AI accelerating how quickly the team can design, code, and test new ideas, Beyond Bank is building the capability to move faster without taking on the big-investment risk that held them back before. The foundation is right. The rhythm is there. And the next layer is already in motion.
Industry
Financial services
