Case study: A hybrid fintech product that bridges traditional banking and digital banking

The Future of Banking Is the Bank-Fintech Hybrid

Onboarding Process

“Collaboration is key to the next wave of fintech. As the fintech ecosystem matures, it’ll become increasingly clear that the best path forward for the industry lies in collaboration among all stakeholders”

Its 2021 and Digital Banking has grown past anyone expectation especially during the rise of Covid 19 where we saw digital payment solutions take a huge leap in almost every area of our lives. As much as Digital banking has grown and how far we have seen the rise of fintech products there a still certain limitations around financial services in both traditional banking and digital banking and an Hybrid approach is the way out of this. To eliminate some of this limitations I designed a mobile application that allows users make cash Transfers, Manage their Assets and Liabilities, Buy crypto and do other amazing stuffs.

Introducing Purple Pay

The creation of PurplePay was fueled by a inclination to create a service to bridge the gap between traditional banking and digital banking. To make this possible I developed features which were robust enough to tackle major challenges across a wide range of users.

The Application design is structured around a simple UI but an extensive UX that caters to everyone of the users Pain point.

How PurplePay Helps its Users.

1. Purple Pay Allows people make Cash transfers to Banks and digital wallets
2. Allows Users to track their loans and mortgages in app and to make payments.
3. Allows users to buy stocks in app and manage their Portfolio
4. Allows Users manage their subscriptions (Netflix, Newsletter, Spotify)
5. A merchant QR feature that allows it users make simple one time payments at any store.
6. Allows People manage their Crypto portfolio, which includes buy and selling different crypto currencies.
7. Allows Users to pay bills in App(Electricity, water)

Documenting My Process

Design Process

During the research process I conducted interviews asking Participants “what they think about digital banking and their individual experiences with it” & What they also think about traditional banking and its limitations. The research question was constructed this way so as to gain an extensive insight on both services.

With this derivatives I conducted usability testing on both digital banking services and Traditional banking services and the tests revealed where both services were lacking and how they could co-habitate to form a hybrid service.

With the research outputs i was able to create a persona of both digital and traditional banking users and their use cases.

1. There were two major takeaways that i gained during the research process, which was the fact that most traditional banking notion of being digital was creating a payment/transfer platform for their users, and it was also limited to nationwide transfer.
2. The second is the fact that most fintech companies were building individual products ranging from(savings, wealth creation, crypto currency applications) instead of partnering to create a more robust products which could have all theses features and be the go to product for a wide range of users.

After the research and interview process i moved on to working on my features and creating a priority matrix of the important and achieve able features. I was able to come up with 6 robust features which were,

features

1. Transfer

The transfer feature has five inbuilt features,

• The first which allows you to make transfer to people with digital bank accounts which uses their mobile number as their account Number.
• You can also make transfer to bank other traditional bank accounts
• You can transfer crypto currencies to anyone in the world using the purple pay app, it has a crypto currency feature that allows you to add your wallet to the purple pay app.
• You can use a QR feature to make transfers to merchants or individual digital bank accounts.

Loan/Mortgage Feature

2. Loan/Mortgage Feature

This feature allows users Track their loans and mortgages in app and also construct a payment structure for them. It gives them detailed insights into how much is still owed and how the payment affects their general finance.

Stock management

3. Stock management

This feature allows users manage their stock portfolio in app to tackle the wealth creation pain point.

Subscription

4. Subscription Feature

This particular feature allows Users track their subscriptions either Netflix, Spotify, newsletter and other services. And they track how much is being paid either monthly or yearly.

5. Bill payment

This feature allows users pay bills either electricity or water or internet services bills .

Crypto feature

6. Crypto Feature

This feature allows users to trade and manage their crypto portfolio in app. You can buy and sell crypto currencies and also make transfers in app, instead of having a separate application for your crypto portfolio, you can connect your account to your crypto portfolio and convert your local currency to any crypto currency and use it as either a transfer feature or wealth management feature.

Merchant QR feature

7. Merchant QR Feature

This feature is part of the transfer feature but its also robust enough to stand alone as an amazing feature that allows users make easy payments to merchants by scanning the store QR code or make interbank transfers by scanning the accounts QR code.

Whats Next?

The goal is to keep creating and updating more features to create a more robust application.

1. A pro version of the application that focuses on wealth management
2. A digital card feature that allows you to use digital cards for international shopping
3. A feature that allows users schedule bill payments before its due date
4. A Threshold feature for the number of subscriptions
5. A budget feature that allows users set Budgets and automated financial goals in app

Takeaway

Working on a project like this introduced me to a different industry and it helped me have a better understanding of the banking space and it also gave me a chance to interview a wide range of users which in turn helped me understand different kinds of users and it made me a more emphatic designer.

Thanks yo for reading my case study . I would appreciate any feedback from you whether it’s concerning my methodology, writing or my design, or any way you think I should improve. Please dont’t forget to clap👏🏾 for me if you love my design and this documentation.

Send a mail to me 📩@adesinasamuel18@gmail.com or Twitter, if you’ll like to collaborate or have a chat. You can also check out my works on on my Portfolio.