CPO — Q2 Product Update
This year to date has been one of our strongest at Plutus, our small and lean product and development team have delivered far more than what you would believe is possible. Through aggressive planning and prioritising backlog, as well as long hours and consistent weekend work, we progressively built our vision of a truly non-custodial consumer financial app; which is far more complex behind the scenes than one might think yet it retains optimal user experience.
Although we’re busy building, I want to update the community on what the team and I are currently working on so that you can anticipate using these product functionalities soon.
The first few months of this year — we saw plenty of product usage; we gathered and parsed data from various funnels, analysed them, and now we are able to iterate the product based on community feedback and collective user data. They include improvements to our core features that will help deliver a smoother and coherent user experience.
2FA
As many of you are aware, we recently enforced 2FA on our platform and this update is driven by changes in the European payment landscape. The legal requirements applied by the European Commission is part of PSD2 (EU Payments Services Directive) which aims to enhance consumer rights and security. For now, users may only use Authy as the trusted 2FA application as it is compatible with our banking provider; we may expand the variety of options down the road which will offer our users more freedom over their two-layer security.
Why is 2FA important?
It adds an additional layer of security and ensures you are the rightful owner gaining access to your financial accounts or making payments to merchants.
Conceptually, it is similar to a security token sent to you on your Bank-issued device, it generates a OTP (one time password) which ensures the highest level of security for your financial accounts.
2FA has now become part of the payments fabric for Europe and its wider region; no doubt, I anticipate this change will bring about enhanced security measures for your financial accounts and minimise the occurrence of fraudulent transactions.
Token Refresh Reminder
Some of you have expressed mild frustration at being automatically logged off after a certain period of time when remaining inactive on your web account (currently, we log users out after four minutes of inactivity per session).
This inactivity timeout serves two purposes; first, it prevents unauthorised access to your account if you have an open session and turned away from the device temporarily and second, it meets the mandatory requirement placed upon us by European banking authority.
It is primarily put in place to help secure the safety of your account and assets.
However, we are taking steps to improve this user experience in two ways.
1. We extended the inactivity timeout from the existing four minutes to the maximum legal limit of five minutes.
2. We will also introduce a session refresh pop-up 30 seconds prior to the timeout that will allow you to extend the session without being logged out.
If you’re using the mobile app, you can regain access with your simple four-digit passcode after your session has timed out.
Mobile Push Notifications
One of the larger updates will be the introduction of mobile push notifications. This one has been in the works for a while — in the very near future, every time there is a payment-related activity made on your Plutus account, you will be informed via push notifications on your mobile app, or via the transaction table on your web application.
This means you would be informed instantly when you make a purchase with your Plutus Debit Card (or if the transaction has been declined). We’ll also inform you if a deposit has arrived and should you notice unusual payments, you can even freeze your card right away via the app and inform us immediately.
We are pushing the following notifications for this iteration:
- KYC Related Notifications
- Card Purchases and Declines
- Fiat Deposits
- Matched Crypto Trade
Future iteration will include notification settings where users can apply control over the type of notification they would like to receive. For this version, we err on the side of caution and will only be pushing important card and crypto-related notifications that will raise your user experience.
Plutus Perks
The feature that has taken up a significant amount of development time is the curation and implementation of Plutus Perks. There are plenty of edge cases and moving parts, as well as a large volume of unavoidable data and transaction reconciliation workflows which are intricate and complex.
We will be scheduling a teaser beta Level 1 release (which includes the Fashion & Retail Category with brands such as Nike and more) in the next two weeks before carefully selecting additional retail partners that will add a vastly improved range of brands for a wider scale July release.
This is the one feature we are most excited about building for you. Along with the improvements we are adding to core functionalities, we aim to deliver a proficient experience with many of the same features offered by banks before other extra add-on features are integrated.
I know everyone is keen to use Perks as soon as possible (so are we!) and it is definitely a key milestone we are working on delivering to you.
We are scheduling our release dates in order of priority: improve core product functionality, reduce unhappy flows, followed by delivering Perks. This strategy will help put in place strong foundations for some equally significant developments that will come to light in the following few weeks. We will share these details in due course and we cannot wait.
Note: Access to level 1 of Plutus Perks will only require staking of 1 PLU to unlock.
Join Us
If you have yet to try the app out, give it a go. We have put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into this product and I would personally love to hear your feedback.
There are plenty of improvements to be made before we are satisfied with this journey but, rest assured, we are on the right path to a truly delightful product and we are building this alongside our users. All announcements will be added to our Plutus Medium Publication which you can find here.
From time-to-time, you can also find me on Discord talking shop. Join our vibrant and warm-hearted community here. We nerd out on protocols, exchanges, languages (R, Python) and more. Be there or be square.
