A tale of third-party integrations: learnings from our eGIRO launch
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you wanted to put some money aside to save or invest, but realised you had already spent it all on rent, groceries, transport, drinks with friends, and potentially a new fancy tech gadget? If the answer’s yes, you’re not alone because a lot of our StashAway customers certainly have.
There were two common reasons for that: first, they would either forget about it or lack the discipline to not spend the money. Secondly, setting up standing instructions or recurring deposits with a lot of banks is a tedious experience.
We wanted to solve this problem and empower our customers to invest money in an easy, hassle-free and automated way. This is why we recently launched our eGIRO feature in Singapore that lets users link their bank account to their StashAway account. In just a few clicks within the mobile app, customers can set up one time or recurring payment schedules directly without having to do anything from their banking provider after an initial set up.
Removing hassles from our customer’s financial journey is an exciting problem for us to solve. Throughout this project, we found lots of learnings and insights about this as well as how to work on a third party integration that we’d like to share with you.
What were our key learnings of the project?
1. It doesn’t always have to be minimalistic and lean
Due to our shortened attention span (thanks, TikTok and Instagram!), we’ve conditioned ourselves to minimise customer journeys and experiences as much as possible. In our initial explorations and user testing sessions, the sentiment was the same. We aimed to shorten the flows, keep screens lean, and focus on necessary copy only in order to reduce drop-off and not distract the user from the main goal. However, once we entered our beta phase, the data completely changed. Both quantitative and qualitative data showed us that customers, contrary to initial user testing sessions, wanted more guidance and a slightly longer process since they were unfamiliar and, at times, confused with the online banking part of the process.
2. Even without full control on the UX/UI, you can smoothen in-app re-direction for customers
Right after we released eGIRO to our beta users in Singapore, we launched an in-app survey aiming to capture feedback from them. What was interesting was that 90% of the complaints we received were about how hard it was to navigate their bank’s web application. While the user experience of the bank site was beyond our control, we fully understood our customers’ frustration and challenged ourselves to see how we could improve the experience even after they left our app to continue the setup process elsewhere.
So, we quickly created a simple step-by-step screen to help our customers navigate the setup process for different banks.
After we added the step-by-step screen, we were happy to receive positive feedback from our customers who thought it helped guide them through the setup process. This experience reminded us of the importance of understanding our users’ pain points and improving their experience, even when the issue seems out of our scope.
3.Identify and profile your key stakeholders
Now, some learning about the project management side. All of us are aware of the different ways of working in a startup compared to a corporate, especially in terms of the number of stakeholders we have to face with various degrees of responsibility and knowledge. It is important to address this issue early on in an integration project with a larger third party partner. We categorised stakeholders according to the following matrix which helped to know whom to address for what. Understanding team structure, personalising communication and using the right channels was a key aspect that helped us succeed in this project. In addition, we also made sure to keep people from the below matrix in the loop, even if they were not part of a meeting. This made all of our lives easier.
4. Document, document, document!
As obvious as it seems, written communication is essential in these kinds of projects. The main value add is that it helps with traceability and accountability. After (nearly) every meeting, we would send a follow-up about the meeting, its outcomes and open to do’s. We would include stakeholders that might not have been in the meeting (especially those who are important decision-makers) to make sure things would move quickly.
What should we have done differently?
Knowing that the eGiro project was a new offering for our integration partner as well, we were aware that there might be unexpected issues along the way. In the early stages of the project, a lot of our questions were around the state of the solution, our partners go-live timeline, and the existence of other customers who had successfully integrated already. A technical proof of concept (POC) helps to answer a lot of these questions in a low-effort way, however in retrospect we identified some key learnings we could’ve approached differently in that phase of the project.
First, separate the POC from the main project and prioritise it into your roadmap as a standalone item, not as the start to the main project. That way, it is ensured that effort is kept to just the POC and you account for “unknown unknowns”. It gives both parties sufficient time to analyse and address any issues found and the main project can be prioritised accordingly, not causing a delay. Secondly, clearly align how many different environments there are, what testing you can or should do on which one as well as any known issues or complexities with the environments. If possible, align to do testing on the production environment (in a controlled way, of course) as early as possible as each environment might have its own issues. You want to understand the behaviour of the environment you will be operating in. Lastly, make sure to establish a direct communication channel between development teams. While this might seem obvious, during these very early phases of a project communication tends to be between the project and product stakeholders mainly. However, the technical nature of this phase requires quick, easy and direct communication between development teams.
We released the feature to all of our customers in Singapore in January 2023. As it usually is the case with technically complex projects including multiple parties, there were challenging times throughout, but we are happy with the final outcome and the learnings we took away from it. However, this is just an MVP and the day of release was also the first day of looking at improvements and iterating further.
Contributors: Patrick Barin, Dara Nadila, Sean Yeoh
