Personal Financial Management on mobile banking app
A product discover case study on Personal Financial Management focused on user testing and enquiry
June - October 2021
-
Research goal
Understand how users currently manage their money and define the Jobs To Be Done
Evaluate Meniga technological offering and features as a partner in the Personal Financial Management (PFM) space to validate it against user Jobs To Be Done
-
Client and project type
The main client was one of South Africa’s big banks. They are exploring how to bring in new features, by leveraging external partners’ technology and capabilities.
During the course of this project, I represented the Bank, and worked closely with the external technology partner to access their capabilities, as well as to define what the Bank’s customers want from them.
-
My role and responsibilities
Engage with the business team to understand the bank’s strategy, communicate progress, milestones and results, and engage with the technology team.
Help formulate business requirements and feature priority roadmap.
Project scope included remote user interviews, prototyping, usability testing, storytelling and formulating insight reports and build a solid business case.
Project Summary
How might we help our customers manage their finances with the banking app, by empowering them with easy to use tool, that learn from their financial behaviour and adapts constantly to be aligned with their personal financial goals, so that we can increase financial literacy and healthy habits in our customer base
The outcome for this project is to have a concrete roadmap with feature priority to match our customers demand and needs, and a successful technology assessment. Apart from our north star goal, we had 2 business focused goals:
Identify the PFM JobsToBeDone for our customers 2. Evaluate the technology partner’s ability to fulfil the JobsToBeDone
The Challenge
Customer challenge
Making money is only half the problem, knowing how to spend your money well, is the bigger, unfulfilled half.
Customer challenge:
The level of financial literacy in South Africa is very low. Basic financial concepts and management skills are only present within a small portion of the population.
This helped us understand that in order for the solution to have a successful uptake, and help users achieve their goals, it needs to have a large component of education around financial basics.
Technical challenge:
Personal Financial management (PFM) is a highly underserved category in the Fintech space, mostly due to the fact that it requires extreme integration into various technologies, building of large scale ecosystems, and intelligence to personalise the experience in order to get it’s proper value.
This is a particularly large challenge when trying to achieve this on the banking app that’s supported and housed on technology and systems built decades ago.
Business challenge:
The bank has a predominately aging customer base. Within South Africa's population of 59.31 million, only 36% of them are active mobile internet users*, and an even smaller percentage are active ‘mobile bankers’.
To increase our customer base, we have to formulate a business case to show how targeting the younger population can be a revenue generating proposition
Research approach
Qualitative & Attitudinal interviews
Because the product demo from the tech third party used dummy data we aimed at leaning into qualitative interviews guided by different Financial events prompted by the Conceptual mockups and the web demo. Each session was divided into two parts. Part one a usability test, and part two was concept testing with more contextual enquiry.
Participants: 29
Session duration: 60 min
Monthly income: R 0 - R 65K (low to high)
Age: 18 - 50
Part 1: Usability test
Our focus was to understand how participants engage with the technology, and demo data on the demo platform, with qualitative questioning aimed to uncover mental models and attitudes towards money management.
Part 2: Concept test
This part of the testing aimed to uncover user sentiment around specific tasks and moments they would encounter with PFM features. These were mid level fidelity mockups that recommended actions to the user based on their behaviour.
Data synthesis
Step 1: Affinity map
This very important first step is to identify surface level patterns by grouping users' responses into common themes. These served as the ‘Stories to be told’.
.
Step 2: Using sentiment as a lens
A key outcome here was the disproving of the hypothesis that LSM grouping is not as relevant when grouping financial behaviour. Financial maturity proved to be the golden thread to our insights.
Step 3: Develop Segment archetypes
We created 3 segments based on the core financial maturity and behavioural cause. This model was used to create feature based patterns and recommendations per segment. This served as our feature priority matrix.
Step 4: Segment lens and PFM categories
We grouped and gathered participant responses based on feature behaviour, and on their segment, in order to guide and inform product roadmap.
Key Finding
Behavioural based segments
We found a direct correlation between financial responsibility and the value derived from budgeting. From this we developed 3 segments; Financial Dependents, Newly Independent, and Financial Provider.
Value: Financial planning vs Spend tracking
Amount the first segment-Financial Dependents, budgeting and planning tools were largely misunderstood and not really found to be valuable. As a result, tracking their spend is more valuable means for managing their money.
Peer comparison as a financial benchmark
Participants were either strongly for or against being compared with ‘relative peer data’.
When the comparison was combined with a challenge to improve their finances, it was more receptive.
Conclusion
Personal Financial Management is highly underserved in Fintech, and especially in South Africa. This is mostly because it requires extreme integration of large scale ecosystems. In South Africa, this becomes even more challenges for banks that are built on decade old systems.
To create a successful PFM on the banking app, there needs to be an accessible education element.
My learnings:
Working on a project that is very much dependent on the technologies available, can be hindering. I had to consider the user, as well as the business systems in order to propose a viable solution.
One thing that was surprising, was even though we interviewed people from all income levels, the basic financial literacy is very much lacking across the board, and very problematic if South Africa wants to improve the financial health of individuals.