Reimagining Finance

Creating a financial solution that challenges traditional banking products.

Challenge

After having built a strong relationship with the internal CX team at Mastercard with years of successfully delivered projects, they invited us to build a digital product alongside the debit card team from the very beginning. The only criteria were to meet the demands of their millennial audience with this white-label product. This was a rare opportunity to be invited at such an early stage and the team set out to create a product unlike any other.

The ask: Create an alternative digital banking solution for millennials who are currently unsatisfied with their current banking product offerings and are using non-traditional financial "stacks" to manage their money and plan for the future.

CLIENT
Mastercard

AGENCY
SapientNitro

ROLE
Creative Lead (UX, Visual, Copy)

Process

Intake & Strategy

Understanding the Mastercard business and defining the strategy to address the market and consumer needs.

Client intake workshop
Fintech landscape readout
Consumer interviews
Value proposition workshop

Ideation

Concepting and prioritizing product features based on consumer journey.

User journey
Feature prioritization
Ideation matrix
Concept development

Design

Defining an ADA-accessible design system flexible to accommodate white-label product variations.

Design system
ADA compliance

Testing

Localizing prototype for testing across nine countries.

Usability testing storyboards
Regional localization

Intake & Strategy

As part of understanding Mastercard, sat down with client teams across various verticals (debit, cx, design, engineering, mba interns) as part of an intake workshop to better understand their business, objective, and pipeline of work. This included a deep-dive of their current research around millennial consumer segments.

Fintech Readout

Developed a Fintech landscape readout that with a market assessment identifying trends in technology, consumer habits, and marketing trends.

Competitor audit was also included across various Fintech verticals including banking, payments, tracking, saving, investing, wealth management, crowdfunding, and debit services.

Value Proposition Workshop

Hosted a series of workshops to create concepts alongside the client. Designed a value proposition framework that was used to create concepts that were then sketched and presented with client and agency teams. Concepts were evaluated based on how well it addressed business, market, and consumer needs and a single value proposition was selected and moved forward with.

Consumer Interviews

As a part of the intake, we conducted interviews with 20 millennials to better understand consumer sentiments around financial habits and fintech product usage.

Insight

Business

Strength of data and user insights based on global Mastercard transactions
Need for a white-label product to sell to bank institutions

Market

Saturated market with many specialized products that don't interact with one another
Shift towards a more connected, always-on technology landscape

Consumer

Different money habits and goals that did not work across various Fintech products
Regardless of Fintech product, still look to advice from family and frends regarding money

Product

Mobile app as medium to connect various data inputs, from physical to digital
Saturated market and consumers looked towards specialized apps to simplify financial "stack"

Ideation

Developed a consumer journey from research gathered through the intake & strategy phase. The consumer journey revealed three key opportunity areas to explore through detailed features that were concepted and sketched for a prioritization exercise with the client.

As a part of the ideation, developed a feature matrix that was mapped to various inspiration and examples from products outside of Fintech, including data visualization from wearable healthcare products and app interfaces from chat apps.

Concepts

Two concepts were designed as part of the experience. Both focus on natural language - a key part of how millennials get their financial advice (talking to friends, family, and financial advisors). It was paramount to simplify and differentiate what would otherwise be an extremely confusing and complex financial dashboard like all other Fintech products.

Both concepts feature a home screen that distills the health of the user's account in a single sentence, as well as a single actionable link to engage with their account.

The first concept uses a familiar navigation paradigm, a single dashboard with dynamic cards. The second concept uses a less conventional navigation paradigm, inspired by chat applications, to use horizontal and vertical scrolls to navigate across and into the feature sets.

Ultimately, the client agreed to take a risk in this app for testing with concept two, which was a big win for the team.

Design

To make it white-label accessible, developed a palette of top banks in partnership with Mastercard to test out the design. This included primary and secondary colors, bank logos, and proprietary fonts. In addition, design considered ADA accessibility standards for contrast, size, and interaction.

Financial Personality

Based on interviews, consumers had a myriad of financial habits. Some people were interested in saving, while others were focused on paying down their debts. To create a truly customized experience, designed various personality types that would shape the entire app experience. Financial personality types were identified using five simple questions that assess financial habits around spending, saving, education, and goals.

Dashboard & Insights

Single dynamic dashboard based on personality type and displays the health of account in natural language. A "safe to spend" value mimics real-life behavior of looking at a wallet before spending money. A single actionable card shows the next step at making a more healthy account.

Insightful Goals

Creating goals becomes more interactive with community insights. Users can select goals based on trending community goals.

As part of creating a fully-connected Fintech product, integrating interesting saving methods like round-up and IFTTT connection to help save additional money based on behavior and recipes.