take your pleasure seriously
and make everything else someone else’s headache
we have been working on digital banking apps in the last five years day and night. the team came up with plenty of ideas, concepts, products, conducted hundreds of customer interviews and user tests. we have learnt a lot, but most of it relates to a single question:
when was the last time you met someone who enjoyed spending time managing personal finances?
honestly, no matter of age, gender, location, habits, financial literacy we all have a lot better things to do then taking care of our own or our families’ financial lives. the ultimate experience is when we can get things done easily with our banks and get back to things we really enjoy doing
this means the only thing customers need is an entirely simplified app that includes straightforward journeys eliminating the pain of unfamiliar jargon, overcomplicated edge cases, and absolutely unnecessary options where one can only get lost. i am confident that most of our banks are far from it even if customer centricity is explicitly put on top of their core priorities. however during the rise of the neo banks this is only a matter of time to reach the point when all these will be hygienic
so this is it?
there is nothing else customers expect from their banks? maybe not, but we would never be satisfied by giving the customers the faster horses of henry ford. this time the team tried to recall and collect all those everyday cases starting with why can’t i or why can’t my bank and turned them into how might we sentences
the bottom line was that we are after some kind of actions based on certain triggers that could automatically run in the background and become the aha moments of the finances
in our concept literally anything could be a trigger, balances, comfort levels, dates, locations, incoming and outgoing transactions, saving levels, but they are absolutely not limited to finances. on other hand actions can also have a wide range of measures, notifying, reminding, executing, reconfiguring, but as always we must keep in mind not to become intrusive
in no time we ran out of space on our floor to ceiling white board wall, it was fully covered by post its of the use cases we have identified. we are a diverse team with different stages of our personal and financial lives, some of us came up with automations to build rainy day savings, others with ideas to boost sustainable finances, basic reminders to avoid late bill payments, smart notifications for keeping budgets, advanced security enhancements for frequent travellers, nudges to achieve saving goals or various proximity based actions
looking at the board we all wished our banks provided only a portion of the ideas and welcome us to the 21st century finances. after seeing some genuine smiles on our testers’ faces we understood that we are not only entertaining ourselves
from confusion to value
we were yet to come up with a nice journey to properly introduce the radically new concept to the customers, build a viable ecosystem of the automations, highlight the relevant and popular ones and eventually encourage the usage of these actions
while iterating the journey it became quickly evident that we need to put great emphasis on two factors: #1 simplification of actions and #2 a proper way of introduction to the concept in the context of a banking app. for the sake of the first one we went on with the easy to digest yet very powerful cases and left the rest for later phases. as always zero effort principle was our main driver, actions come preconfigured that someone can immediately start or if she wants configure in 15 seconds. the second challenge was to inspire and encourage the customers for the first use. we dealt with that with an overwhelmingly simple tutorial that has a very human tone of voice and we carefully chose a pretty understandable everyday use case that noone gets confused or afraid of
we have a few more add ons in our concept like action recommender based on relevancy, but there is one more important question you might have been already thinking of: so is this another crm system? it is definitely not a crm/campaign management system that relies heavily on the admin trying to come up with the right campaign based on either intuition or some level of big data aggregation. instead of relying on admin this tool gives the management of personal finances in the hand of the end users in a completely effortless way: pick a relevant predefined action, give it a go and forget about it
elegantly simple
it is credited to leonardo da vinci one of the greatest minds all time that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, and that was the driver of this concept too. in the background we run machine learning algorithms to gain insights for our action recommender, we run on a fairly complicated real time database architecture, but on the customer side this looks extremely simple and we believe very powerful at the same time. we still have a lot enhancements in our minds, but first things first, we need to learn about our idea in real life environment as our mantra is think big, start small, move fast
our pleasure is digital banking so you can have some time for yours too
