InstaSave
Challenge
Foreign workers spend hours queuing at WesternUnion and Moneygram outlets to remit money home on a weekly basis. In addition to being a waste of time, they are not getting the most favorable rates.
My Role
As product owner, I led customer discovery, conducted user interviews through focus groups, and owned the process of designing the online and offline user experience.
Outcome
Shipped an MVP of a mobile wallet app catering to the needs of the unbanked and underbanked in Southeast Asia
Approach
Research
I led the research on competitors and their offerings and tested some of these options ourselves to understand the benefits and pain points to users.
Define
We conducted focus groups with the target users to better understand their relationship with money, and explore how they might benefit from a savings product.
Ideate & Prototype
I worked with payment partners to design onboarding user experience both online and offline, and worked with the design consultant to design marketing collateral required for onboarding. I managed a team of remotely located engineers in delivering v1 of the app with the savings, remittance and bill payment features functional.
Test & Validate
We internally tested to fix bugs and highlight known issues for the next release cycle. We validated the in-app user experience with 5 users who fit the persona.
Research
InstaRem is Asia’s leading digital international money transfer service. InstaSave was a product of InstaRem, leveraging its unique payment mesh technology to enable fast and easy remittances by individuals from the convenience of their mobile phones.
As at 31 Dec 2015, 85% of the total foreign workforce of Singapore - approximately 1.2 million people - were engaged in domestic, sanitation and construction work in Singapore. Here’s what we knew about this segment:
With a total resident population of 5.6m, that’s a whopping 21% of people in Singapore fitting into the above persona, whose banking experience we could potentially improve.
Define Phase
We identified that smartphone usage, particularly low-cost Android devices, is high among this segment. It made sense to leverage mobile technology to address their pain point in managing their finances.
Goals
The first step was to prioritize based on the goals they wanted to achieve. We conducted focus group sessions with participants who fit the persona, to better understand their relationship with their finances. Of the goals they vocalised, we evaluated what experiences could be designed for and delivered as an MVP and settled on the following goals:
Customer Journey
Onboarding was the most challenging part about designing this MVP. In order for our target market to start using the funds in this account, we needed to convince employers to pay their wages into the InstaSave account. As part of the regulatory requirements in Singapore around operating as a stored-value facility, we also had to undertake the process of KYC by integrating our onboarding with legacy software.
For product, this meant that I had to ensure the flow took into account both offline and online experiences that the user would go through, while still meeting verification standards set by the authorities:
In the onboarding flow, I outlined every possible interaction - detailing both success and failure states - that the user was likely to experience. I mapped these against the user stories and goals for using this app.
Ideate & Build
With the most challenging part out of the way, designing the MVP of the app was a much easier task. A few of the screen UI designs that were eventually integrated into an MVP are shown below.