Creating a greenfeild fintech app that leverages open banking

The challenge

HSBC came to us requesting the creation and delivery of a mobile Alpha. The app uses open banking data combined with data science to help SMEs predict and manage their cash flow. We spent 12 weeks researching, designing, testing and delivering the app into a working Alpha.

For user research, we managed to find willing small business owners to take part in face-to-face interview sessions. To conduct these, we would travel to their place of business wherever in the country that may be. The sessions would begin by diving into their common financial processes and pain points, stakeholders and so on. The companies that we interviewed ranged from small hotel owners to a windmill repair company, so it was fascinating to observe which issues were shared across all companies and which ones were unique. For example, the windmill repair company would need the app to be available on Android as all their employees use military-grade Motorola’s that can survive a 100-footfall.

From our findings, we were able to create personas and user needs. This was then refined into a feature list as a starting block for the designs. Furthermore, I did some visual exploration to figure out the look and feel of the app. The two primary wants from the client were that the app was not HSBC branded nor did it look like any other bank. The client also wanted the feel of the app to emphasise the use of very new technological capabilities. Through refinement and criticism, we landed on a visual style. I then carried that look across the app using the framework I had defined previously. Using those designs I created a v1 prototype using the program ‘Flinto’. This gave me the ability to build in actual complex touch interactions that wanted to test, such as a sliding menu.

We then returned to our willing research subjects to user-test our prototypes and understand whether the direction we were going with would bring value to our users.

Using these insights I continuously refined the designs throughout the development process. Over the following weeks, I worked side by side with our front-end and back-end developers so that we could move at an extremely fast cadence. We would work together quite well solving dependancies on the fly.

The outcome

All in all, we managed to design, test and deliver alpha in 12 weeks putting the app in the hands of 20 business owners for further observation over the coming year.