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overview
The Reserve Bank of India launched the Payments Bank model in 2015 to cater to the largely unbanked populace of the country. Their target customers included migrant labourers, low-income households and small businesses.
The idea behind launching these banks was to bring this sector pf people into the digital world and enable e-transactions for their needs.
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brief
The Aditya Birla group required a banking interface that would effectively work with challenges such as catering to first-time users from the un-banked sector and operating tier three and four cities and villages.
They solicited Fractals expertise to create a banking experience that would work for both, village and urban users.
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challenge
Fractal Ink waded through untested ground to design solutions for target users, who were largely unaccustomed to using digital banking services and had little trust in non-traditional saving models.
Further, the bank app and website had to be simple enough for first-time users yet attractive for urban users.
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strategy
Fractals extensive research and client profiling revealed that the Banks target users financial comfort zone extended only to the local ecosystem of shopkeepers.
Realising that traditional banking interfaces would not work, a strategy to build completely different experiences for the 2 buckets of audiences was agreed upon.
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innovation
A Retail Assisted Module was created for these shopkeepers, who would bring their rural customer base into the fold, assist them with services and in turn earn commissions.
A simple and sophisticated-looking website and app also allowed first-time users new experiences such as paying utility bills online and purchasing remotely available products.
BUILDING BLOCKS FOR DESIGNING AN ECOSYSTEM
When you are building a system this big, the approach to design needs to be different. We designed a living system of modules and elements which come together to form layouts. This methodology allowed us to build a scalable system and also helped maintain consistency along the journey.
BANKING TO APPEAL TO MILLENIALS
We built an online portal to support the banks marketing activities. It effectively showcased all the features and advantages of the platform. The website was designed as a responsive site and users could become a customer completely online with minimum interaction in the physical realm.
UNIFIED PAYMENTS INTERFACE (UPI)
With the government of India pushing digital payments by enabling UPI transactions, we built a UPI interface that was one of the banks highlights. We studied the apps and interfaces that users were familiar with and narrowed in on WhatsApp. The entire app was chat based and extremely easy and engaging in the way it worked.
BANKING AND BEYOND
The nature of a payments bank is that it brings a bouquet of banking related and other products like insurance, mutual funds and e-commerce to its users. Future plans include enabling booking of tickets for travel and services like bill payment through the banking interface.
WITH THOUGHT AND CARE
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90 SECOND ONBOARDING
On-boarding continues to be the journey that sees the highest percentage of drop-offs because of how long and complex they are. Every step provides friction in terms of data that needs to be posted and verified and we often see failures.
We broke the journey into small steps and engaged with the user at each of them, encouraging them to stay the course and complete the journey
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RETAIL ASSISTED BANKING
Early in the journey there was a realisation that when it comes to money, the trust lies in the hands of the retail Kirana shops which existed in the tier 3 and 4 towns. This allowed us to build a strategy around this insight which put the retailers at the centre of this ecosystem.
Incentive modules were designed to get the retailers onboarded and in turn facilitate the banking services for their customers. Retailers saw this as an opportunity to expand their services by simply signing up. It allowed them to add to their existing income sources which proved to be win win situation for both ABPB and the retailers.
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BUILDING AND TESTING INTERFACES
Fractal team used variety of methods to test the interfaces and journeys early in the project. Right from techniques like paper prototyping, Interactive prototyping, affinity mapping, and closed group testing were adopted to build designs which would yield better usability.
Different visual tools were used to make the interface as language agnostic as possible. During the research we found out about literacy standards around and tried to adopt numbers and colours to communicate rather than loads of text.
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DATA ANALYTICS & REPORTING
We built a variety of embedded services which allowed users to analyse their spending and visualise them in very easy to read interfaces. With patterns established the bank was able to recommend services which would help them grow and protect the wealth.
With variety of services from aggregators, the reports were not only able to suggest products but also allow them to buy them online with minimum human intervention. Easily build and roll these out.
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cups of coffee
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blinks per hour
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laptop charges
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social gatherings ignored
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hours of travel
