BCA Banking App Redesign: Your Only Financial Apps

I’m tired of having multiple finance apps on my phone. I wish there is one app that could have covered all my financial needs — and then some.

Notes: This app will be my only portfolio for a long time. I will periodically update the design and post a follow-up article about my design decision — just like a regular product development process. In this part, we will only explore the home page. If you only here to view the Figma files, please click here.

What if you only own one finance app?

When I was a child, everything I have is divided either on the bank or on my wallet. As I grew older and had my portfolio a little bit diversified, it’s getting harder and harder to estimate whether my asset really grow or it is just an illusion. Is my overall investment across all the asset classes growing, or the loss I have from stop-selling my stock yesterday is bigger than my overall gain from the crypto market? Are the total gain of the overall asset completely overshadowed by the loan interest? How could I go broke when all I buy is on a Steam sale and e-commerce discount?

To kill all the middleman

Finance is hard — no way around that. That is why there are thousands of entities trying to help people at various stages; saving, investing, diversifying, budgeting, news, prediction, forum, technical analysis, training or coaching. The more you are involved with the finance world, the more you are subscribed to stuff to make sure you are not missing out. Personally, I consider myself at the low-end of the financial literacy scale. I know a little bit about everything, but no expert on anything. That being said, even I feel like I subscribed on too much stuff. This is a list of stuff I usually do, related to finance:

1. Open my banking apps for checking balance & expenses directly from my cards,
2. Open my various wallet account to cross-check expenses and make sure there’s enough money in the app,
3. Open my crypto investment app and check my gain (more like loss, Ed.),
4. Check my U.S stock,
5. Check my Indonesia stock,
6. Check my other investment app (P2P, bonds, mutual fund, etc.),
7. Open Tradingview to check on various charts I am subscribed into,
8. Read financial news using website, forum, group, or social media account,
9. Open my personal finance document that summarizes all the stuff above.

That is a lot of apps for a lot of different functions. At most, apps will be able to perform 3 out of 9 functions listed above. As a normal human being, I want more. I want simplicity, I want speed. I want one app to rule them all.

Pretty reasonable request, right?

BCA; What Could be Better?

A little notes: I’ve been doing this project long before myBCA came out. Since then, I update some of the UI a little bit to match the new brand looks, while still focusing on improving the BCA mobile usability.

A lot of people often say that the BCA mobile apps are considered the model for a good banking app. Usually, the praise follows the same theme: despite the outdated UI, the platform is performing what it is expected to do. This is commonly known as ‘The Reddit’ — a website so functional people just ignore the supposedly ‘ugly UI’. The question is, is BCA fits the description of this category?

BCA is excellent for a very important thing: making a successful transaction, specifically transferring. This is incredibly important especially for a finance app because the number one consideration for a finance app is trust. I have been using BCA mobile for at least 5 years, and I don’t think I have ever encountered a failure of any kind — except the warning when you do not have a stable internet connection to execute a transaction. This is a remarkable accomplishment, especially in times when everyone is going around creating passable banking apps. But is functionality in transactions is the only thing you need to be considered a good finance app?

An example of the problem with BCA

Inconsistent hierarchy

A good product hierarchy is well placed according to a grouping that naturally makes sense. Information about your investment (the green one) should be grouped together to help you find and navigate faster. Miscellaneous information about financial products you might like could be appealing to you if placed well and well-promoted.

Low discoverability and confusing placement

Unless you are really used to where things at, you would find it very difficult to do one new thing. For example, take a note of the number above the action button on the image above. To access credit card expenses and limits, you go to page #1, information, but to pay it? #3, payment. To pay a water bill, you go to #3 — payment, but to pay for the electricity you would have to go to #4. What’s the difference between payment and commerce? Even until now, I still stop and think about where do I click to pay for my internet bill. It’s on #3 for my phone bill, but my home internet bill is on #2. Why? Because why should my life be simple, that’s why.

Enhancing Function

I feel like BCA is really successful at informing us. Do not get me wrong, this is a successful first step. You need your banking app to inform you correctly, but we as a customer expected to wise up and continue on our own. Am I spending my expense recklessly this month? (Yes, Ed.) Is DCA-ing into crypto actually bringing net positive asset appreciation? How is my net worth grow year to year?

There is a lot of avenues, and a lot of metrics we can use to help the average joe achieve a better understanding of their finance. From simplest things like expense tagging and breakdown to complex stuff like time-weighted ratio, banking app could help users understand where they are in their financial journey and how certain strategies can help them.

Redesign Process: Home

My aim is to make your bank account to be the central station to your financial life. Your financial activity should start and finish here. It would make the most sense for it to be able to specifically cater to your needs, and all essential and repeatable actions important to you are within reach. My goals in this exercise are two:

1. The main theme of the redesign is customization. I want the app to be able to reflect the needs of different sets of people,
2. Even though new investment product shows up all the time, and how people measure value change, I want the app to be able to endure the ever-changing landscape of the financial world.

Breaking and Remapping Function

First of all, let’s destroy and recategorize all the functions in the current BCA into four main categories: Transact, Manage, Inform, and Account. This is done to prevent original functions from missing in this redesign.

Evolving Home

A good case of redesign process is usually able to replicate the spirit of the original design while supercharging performance and usability. Take a note of the major changes from BCA mobile to myBCA:

1. They add the balance at the top — because a lot of primary use case of opening the app is for checking the balance,
2. They narrow down the action into one row instead of three,
3. They create favorited transactions to increase ease of use of repeated action, and
4. They create the concept of widgets.

That’s a very targeted redesign, ones that did not create unnecessary pomp and frills. I don’t think I should change a lot during this page except for reinforcing core actions, increasing white space, adding margins, and toning down the colour to withstand long term usage.

(Re)introducing widgets

This part is barely touched by myBCA, but this could be our first window into customizability on BCA. In this iteration, I added 5 widgets (for now); Asset watchlist, Expense, Exchanges, Financial Literacy, and Shortcuts. Here is the preview from some of the widgets in action:

Asset Watchlist
You could place your favourite assets to display and a lot of others behind the view all button. What’s different is you could insert any asset class you want to watch, instead of only U.S. Stock, for example.

An overall view, as well as a delete options

Shortcuts
Shortcuts, like its name, is made to make repeated actions easier and more fun. You could transfer to not only to one, but up to [whatever the technical limit number of user per transaction]. Obvious next step would be automation, which is a shortcut triggered automatically — by the date, or once every week.

Examples of the shortcut actions, creation, and activation

Shortcuts usage on different types of account

First out of Four Part Series

Reviewing cashflow & assets

The overview health of your portfolio

This took a while to design, surprisingly. It was fun, but honestly, there is too much redesign on my part. This page alone has changed a few times before I decided to publish it. I would not want to delay this further and decided to publish it first and edit it on the fly.

The second part would be the asset management page, the one I actually very excited about. This part is the steak of the redesign, while the home is mere sizzle. Images above this are the preview of something I would definitely change again. The third part is the investment page, and lastly the payment page. After that, I will implement minor changes for pages, just like a normal product development cycle.

Please leave a comment if you have an opinion on what a good banking app should do, whether it’s for home, or for certain other parts of the app. For example, you want the Exchange Widget to show cross-currency triangulation, or Asset Watchlist Widget to reflect the actual stock amount you own with real-time profit/loss. Let’s hope that the banking apps you own view this and implement them!

See you in two weeks! Or three? Maybe four. I will update the links here.