*Personal Financial Managment
Overview & Challenge
According to The Banker magazine, Sberbank (Sber) is one of the 30 largest banks in the world. It has over 100 million customers, making it the largest bank in Central and Eastern Europe.
For the last 2 years I have been working at Sber with various teams mostly from the PFM (Personal Finance Management) tribe, where we create services that allow usres to manage their money more efficiently and increase their wealth.
What is the problem?
• 43% of able-bodied Russians do not have any savings
• 82% do not control or plan their expenses
• 98% of able-bodied Russians do not invest in the future at all
And all these statistics show only the tip of the iceberg of the financial problems of the population in Russia.
When I was invited to work at Sber, the PFM tribe was still forming, but a number of key services already existed.
The “Total Funds” service, which was outdated by that time, was among key ones; inside it, users could see all their funds in one place.
Together with the team, we had a goal to globally rethink and rebuild this service.
**There are many NDA restrictions in Sber, so some of the information from the case is hidden.
Company
Sberbank (Sber)
year
2019 — currently
Responsibilities
UX / UI・User research・Leading design team
First steps
We needed to rebuild an already working service with an audience of 1.5 million people.
Since we had not only to customize the existing service, but also to rethink it globally, in accordance with the general concept of the PFM tribe, we decided, after researching the target audience, to also conduct a design-thinking session.
Our work at that time included the following stages:
• Analysis of an existing product
• Analysis of the target audience and existing patterns of behavior
• Identification of key user needs
• Formation of hypotheses of the future product
• Hypotheses testing
• Formation of a product backlog based on the results obtained
Analysis & Design thinking session
We conducted a quantitative research, polled more than 1,200 people of the existing service audience. We also analyzed the relationship between various groups of users, the amount of their funds in the bank and their business attractiveness for Sber.
As a result, we identified 4 target audiences for the future service, and it turned out that basically all of them are people with an upper-middle income level.
Design Thinking session began with the empathy phase, in which a qualitative in-depth research was conducted with 13 respondents who match one of the target user groups.
After that, over the next 6 days, we went through the stages of developing ideas, creating prototypes and their final testing on users.
Next stages
After going through the Design Thinking session and drawing up a detailed roadmap based on the backlog, we finally began to develop detailed solutions, starting with a redesign of the existing service.
#1 Redesign
We did for users:
Grouped all products by types (cards, savings, investments) giving users clear view of assets + forming an idea of the right capital composition.
Realized that, despite the fact that the pie chart (donut) is objectively not the most convenient visualization for an accurate analysis of funds, clients like it and want to use it.
So we added some new interactions + pleasant vibration when rolling the donut
#2 Leading buttons
We did for users:
Created a context buttons which leads to opening new products in fewer clicks
Put product list on the bottom sheet layer, so users could hide the donut and work only with list
We did for Sber:
Created an additional flush of customers to the inner product market.
Our service became second most popular entry point for inner market, about 13% of all customers have been coming from Total funds.
Increased MAU and Retention rate
#3 Financial cushion
We did for users:
We've been Involving users to accumulate Financial cushions by giving answers to the questions "for what" and "how much I need to save up"
We've been helping with the calculation by automatically setting up the amount of expenses from the users monthly cost analysis
+
81
%
of users continue to accumulate Financial cushion when it is created from Total funds, compared with ordinary Targets
#4 History + Filters
We did for users:
The history of capital helps users understand what the capital consisted of and how the capital changed over time.
The money delta of capital change is the main indicator of the success of savings.
'The first thing I would like to seen in the history is the delta.' (from user qualitative interview)
Added three types of asset grouping + filters, that gave users the ability to look at their assets from different angles and make the right decisions.
+ Added obligation section, developed together with another team of PFM colleagues.
And after all these iterations, we realized that we were some way wrong.
Many researches gave us the impression that target audiences need tools to deeply and thoroughly analyze their funds.
However, after a while, starting to find out the reasons for the metrics drop, we understood that even people from the target high-income audience would like simpler tools and triggers to better manage their capital.
So... We have rethought our approach to the entire service and its navigation, tried to clean up the interface, leaving only the key functions.
#5 Last improvements
We did for users:
Easy and intuitive interface, all core features are closer for users:
We did for Sber:
Retention rate were increased
Increased conversion to sales in inner market
Incerased service MAU
Increased CSI (Customer Satisfaction Index)
Results
Over the past 2.5 years at Saber, I have learned a lot, and my team and I have created services that our users and stakeholders really like.
Incresed service MAU from 1.4 M users to 4.2 M users
Increased penetration rate into the entire app audience from 3% to 5.7%
Increased sales of investment products & generated additional revenue of $20+ million
"
Together with the team, we managed to achieve excellent results, creating a platform that is useful for users and strategically important for the further development of the company's business.
Alexander Bondarenko, Chief product officer
Scope of work
Design
Wireframing
App design iOS / Android
Design system
Prototyping & animations
Products supervision
Marketing materials
Products presentations
Discovery
User qulitative research
User quantitative research
A/B testing research
Competitors research
Many concepts
Strategy
Design thinking sessions
Stakeholders alignment
Information architecture
Other
Mentoring course in BHSAD
Mentoring junior designers
Reviewing other teams
