Fee Experience
Reframing banking fees through clarity, context, and control
Overview
I led the transformation of Chase’s fee transparency experience, partnering with cross-functional teams to unlock a $15M opportunity and reduce cost-to-serve by 50%. Through a customer-centered service design strategy, we delivered proactive, intuitive tools that empowered customers to manage fees, make informed decisions, and take control of their financial journey.
The Challenge
Banks often charge a Monthly Service Fee (MSF) for maintaining a checking or savings account—typically in exchange for services like overdraft protection and ATM access. While customers can avoid this fee by meeting certain requirements (e.g., minimum balance, direct deposit), the experience surrounding it is often unclear.
Chase’s MSF experience lacked transparency around 3 key areas:
Why a fee was charged
How to avoid it
What value the fee actually covered
Though fee information is shared during account opening, there’s a significant gap in ongoing communication. This lack of visibility leaves customers confused, frustrated, and unable to make informed decisions about managing their accounts.
Process
We approached the fee transparency challenge as a service design opportunity—breaking the initiative into 3 distinct phases. I started with mapping the full customer journey and identifying critical moments of inflection where timely, relevant tools could reduce confusion and build trust.
Key aspects of discovery included:
Auditing Existing Experience
Mapped current-state journeys to uncover gaps in fee communication and customer understanding.
Validating Secondary Research
Confirmed key behavioral and attitudinal insights through internal data and prior studies.Benchmarking External Experiences
Analyzed industry and adjacent players to identify best practices in transparency and trust-building.
Strategy
Through our research, we identified that the core issue wasn’t just fee avoidance—it was a lack of control and predictability in how fees were communicated. Customers felt blindsided, and the absence of ongoing, transparent touchpoints made it difficult for them to proactively manage their accounts.
To address this, we mapped customer journeys across distinct lifecycle stages—pre-acquisition, onboarding, monitoring, and transitioning—to uncover mindset shifts throughout the fee experience. We identified short- and long-term opportunities, layering in behavioral modes (proactive vs. reactive, aware vs. unaware) to guide targeted interventions and messaging strategies.
Lifecycle Opportunities
Experience Principles
We grounded our strategy in four key experience principles designed to shift customer mindset around fees—from frustration to informed control. The goal wasn’t just to clarify fee structures, but to reframe fees as a manageable, expected part of banking—rooted in transparency, not penalty:
Simplify
Use clear, jargon-free language to standardize fee communication across all touchpoints.Personalize
Tailor insights to lifecycle stages, delivering proactive, relevant messaging aligned to customer behavior.Educate
Clarify the value behind fees by highlighting the services they cover and how to optimize account usage.Support
Offer contextual help through self-service, timely alerts, and human-assisted guidance for complex scenarios.
Impact
By embedding these principles across Chase’s omni-channel experience, we transformed fee transparency from a friction point into a trust-building opportunity. The result was a more intuitive and proactive fee experience that:
Reduced customer frustration and confusion around fees
Increased engagement with self-service tools for fee management
Strengthened Chase’s positioning as a customer-first financial partner
By shifting the conversation from fee avoidance to value perception, we aligned this strategy with Chase’s larger "We’ve Got Your Back" mission—helping customers take greater control of their financial well-being.