Disruptor and challenger banks are fast eating away at the market share of institutional banks. Traditional banks find themselves competing and playing catchup with new banking applications who possess the ability to roll our features faster and provide more superior financial management features within their application.
Recently Revolut revealed they had reached the 20 million customer mark and Chime in the US raised $ 200 million, giving it unicorn status.
AWSM(“awesome”) is the thought piece of Gennadiy Khayutin and Alibek Junisbayev both of whom have vast experience in the financial services industry. AWSM considers themselves an Edtech company with Fintech elements. AWSM teaches teens and their parents financial literacy by intertwining video content with actual full-service banking. It offers all the products of a typical bank. These products are designed to be safe enough for teens so that by the time they reach 18, they have had debit cards, tried credit cards, and learned how to manage debt and lend to their siblings. AWSM helps teens to avoid making stupid mistakes in early adulthood, and in the process, becomes the very first bank in their life.
In assisting their goal for a Q3 launch AWSM engaged with Jyst to bring their brand UI/UX to life so that AWSM can join the list of disruptor banks taking the world by storm.
When building the UI/UX for a Fintech and Edtech application we had to breakdown all processes, screens, gestures and customer journeys, then map them out so design met functionality and user experience.
Here is a breakdown of some challenging questions we had to overcome to design the UI and UX of a fintech app.
- How do you increase engagement in an application that crosses both the edtech and fintech industries?
- How do you create a rewards-based UI for a fintech app to increase the engagement on typically “boring” topics, interest and saving rates?
- How do you onboard customers for a fintech product considering AWSM’s aim is to acquire teens and parents as customers.
- How do you work with the developers to build a UI/UX experience across two different contents.
So let’s start from the top
Q1. How do you increase engagement in a fintech app at the same time as project an educational message?
Engagement is vital when developing an application for the fintech industry. Long gone are the days of a once-monthly statement in the post. Now customers need instant metrics, notifications and breakdown on expenditure.
Here’s how we increased engagement
- Ease of use – people will not engage with anything hard to use or understand. Simplicity is one thing, but portraying value-added functionality while retaining simplicity is the main challenge. Here we used the easy navigation, menu bars and gestures to increase the engagement with the AWSM app.
- Minimize the number of processes to any key action No one wants to see screens of information or pages and pages of terms and conditions. So attention was paid to portraying what is necessary to a customer in their first session after creating an account.
Q2. How do you create a rewards based UI for a fintech app?
The topics that provide course content on are not typically on the wishlist of any teenager to learn. Therefore we have to increase the rewards based feature set to drive engagement on typically “boring” topics such as interest and saving rates.
Sophisticated Rewards – We all have that one application on our phone that brings us back for more. Be it the dopamine hit from a like on a photo, or a reward or badge for finishing exercise class. Cleverly laying out a sophisticated rewards structure leads to higher engagement across all age brackets. With AWSM an advanced rewards programme for educational courses was built into the application creating an incentive element within the platform. When incentive meets education, it’s a powerful combination.
Q3. How do you onboard customers for a fintech product considering AWSM aim is to acquire teens and parents as customers.
Think about how difficult it is to acquire one customer demographic, now consider having two demographics that you aim your Fintech and Edtech application at.
When looking at onboarding the idea is to be concise yet precise. By law you have to capture specific information to open a bank account. This process was simplified using the inbuilt scanning of photo identity, meaning the on-boarding screens and data collection processing time is halved.
Utilize Touch ID for quick sign-in – Applications that have Touch ID, have a much higher engagement rate than those that don’t. By implementing touch ID, you are much more likely to convert a customer and bring them back for their next web or app session.
Deliver the feature and benefits for the user before they use the application -Use the on-boarding screens to push features, remember in the signup process the customer still doesn’t know all the elements within the app. Do not lose this screen real estate space and push capabilities and features.
Let’s get one thing straight; as a teen you do not want your parents to have visuals over everything that you do (banking included) However, when you flip the concept around and offer more freedom when you reach your goals, things fall into place.
Edtech Gamification – AWSM utilizes a lot of gamification throughout the app to drive people back to the app, which improves acquisition growth, but also to increases customer retention.
Below are some measures AWSM implemented with Jyst to gamify the platform.
- Bonuses badges and rewards for completing chores and finishing courses
- Key metrics and KPI’s on spending and saving habits
- Progress indicators on their journey within the app.
Q4. How do you work with the developers to build a UI/UX experience across two different continents?
Like many of our clients, AWSM is based and headquartered in New York. Jyst Creative are headquarters in the UK.
Working remotely with clients we have honed our skills and processes to make sure the clients while miles away always have access to the team when most needed.
For this project we used a combination of Zoom, InVision and internally Slack to ensure that the UI/UX interface of the AWSM did justice to the team and product that Gennadiy and Alibek have built.
