Research into the problem space
Banking in Nigeria:
Any country’s ability to prosper economically depends on having a stable financial system and a strong banking system. The significant challenges affecting Nigeria’s banking industry have made it impossible for the country to have a stable financial system.
According to a report from Renaissance Capital, Nigerian banks are still on the radar to face some difficulties in years to come, which include increased effective tax rates, historically low-interest rates, and competition from fintech.
Some of the problems that might be faced include:
Competition from fintech, shaking Nigeria’s banking industry
Political risks are another challenge in Nigeria’s banking industry
The Treasury Single Account’s (TSA) implementation
Poor capitalization
Research into the solution space
A perfect solution we found to help tackle this problem is called Financial Inclusion. Financial inclusion means that individuals and businesses have access to useful and affordable financial products and services that meet their needs – transactions, payments, savings, credit and insurance – delivered in a responsible and sustainable way.
Financial inclusion has been identified as an enabler for 7 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
The G20 committed to advancing financial inclusion worldwide and reaffirmed its commitment to implement the G20 High-Level Principles for Digital Financial Inclusion.
The World Bank Group considers financial inclusion a key enabler to reduce extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity.
Being able to have access to a transaction account is a first step toward broader financial inclusion since a transaction account allows people to store money, and send and receive payments. A transaction account serves as a gateway to other financial services, which is why ensuring that people worldwide can have access to a transaction account continues to be an area of focus for the World Bank Group (WBG).
As a Nigerian, it's easy to see the challenges faced in the banking sector, and with a lot of research and findings obtained from individuals, a couple of questions came to mind.
"How can we make critical financial solutions that can aid users to make better financial decisions?"
To tackle this discomfort and hardship, I realised that people want to be able to go through their daily financial activities with ease and with no hassle.
Following these insights, it is therefore important to design robust a solution that can help users perform day-to-day transactions in a closed ecosystem of buyers and sellers, with seamless interaction.
User interviews:
The goal of design research was to inform the design process from the perspective of the end user. As an average Nigerian, I could empathise with the problem stated above but I need to ensure design decisions are from the user's view of the design solution.
Firstly, we needed to know
"Who will be using our products?",
"Who is our Target audience?".
These are the first questions to ask ourselves. From research data in Nigeria, the highest age band of internet users are between the ages of 18-60 (Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X). These age brackets are known to be quite familiar with the internet. They are in the category of college students and workers and in some brackets, “retirees”. There might be people older than this class of users, but most of the users will sit at this range. We will be making our emphasis on young graduates, workers and older users as they are most likely to be the prominent users of this product.
Took my time to draft iterations of each screen of the app on paper to ensure that the elements that made it to the final digital wireframes would be well-detailed to address user pain points.
Took my time to draft iterations of each screen of the app on paper to ensure that the elements that made it to the final digital wireframes would be well-detailed to address user pain points.
After so much work on research, insights and creating wireframes, it was time for the visual design. Designing this we kept our users in mind and made sure we made use of trendy and up-to-date design methods.
We made sure to do our designs in stages to help us carefully and critically work in order of plan.
Design System:
To design for scale and have a unified experience across the product, I created and standardized a component-based design system used across our entire product verticals. It also ensured product consistency and set up design and development time
