Kruma, banking with ease: Case Study
Complete day to day banking needs with ease in Africa.

Overview
Kruma is a startup that is going to revolutionize the way african adults handle their money. They’ll offer cost effective and convenient banking features that traditional banks in Africa lack. Their goal is to allow africans and african immigrants to complete day to day banking needs with ease.
Identifying the problem
- In Sub-Saharan Africa, 3 out of 4 adults do not have bank accounts with cash management services like debit cards or access to lending and investement services.
- The lack of access to banking services exist because traditional banks are expensive, far away and require lots of paperwork.
- 80% of adults in Sub-Saharan Africa make bill payments with cash, yet 12% of adults there have a mobile money account.
There’s a specific need which is how to build a easy to use, affordable and unique digital product to allow adults from Africa send an receive money, invest and get loans.
User persona & goals
Prior to designing UX and UI, I developed a user persona to better understand the target users of Kruma’s app. This process helped me get into the mindset of the users: identifying their contexts, needs, and goals.
Meet Vilma (60), divorced, living in Ghana and mother of two sons who live in the U.S.
She has always been wishing to do banking transactions with ease in her country and needs to get money from her sons in an easy, secure and affordable way.
Kruma has three main goals:
- Provide low fees that their wallet will appreciate.
- Send, receive, pay, save borrow and invest from anywhere and with a few taps away.
- Exchange money from the U.S and Europe to Africa fast and securely.
Architecture
The client provided me some paper ideas they had in mind for the money exchange feature. Meeting with them and understanding what was needed to be done, I had to define the layout.

Visual Design
Now that I had the low-fi sketches the client provided, the next step of this process was adding an UI design touch so that it could look clean yet intuitive for adults to use.
The UI must have the following:
- Easily understandable design system.
- Recognizable icons and buttons.
- A clear money exchange process.
- Interface elements well-positioned.


In the home screen users can:
- See their balance and change the currency to the one they’re more comfortable with.
- Be aware of their movements. I added a familiar color system for the credits and debits: green for positive (incomes/credits), red for negative (expenses/debits).
- If needed, they can tap the type of movement in order to see more details of it. They can also filter by category, date or price.
I wanted to make sure adults get this dynamic so we had to keep it clean and understandable.
Previous considerations
One of the features in the sign-up process, is that the user can pick out the country they’re in and the currency they use so that the app automatically selects the ‘exchange from’ currency by default and then they just have to select the country/currency they’re sending money to. Countries are sorted alphabetically and have their respective flags.
We don’t want them to waste time selecting their home currency each time they’re going to make a transaction.


Finally, users select the amount of money they’ll exchange and automatically see the amount of money the other person is going to receive. They get a breakdown below with all the transactional details and proceed the operation.
