Driving user adoption of open banking for an investing app

Company: ForMore is a pre-seed stage fintech startup. They're a savings and investments app designed to help people get more from their live savings.

Project: Designing and optimising the open banking flow for when users make deposits and withdrawals.

My role: Leading content strategy & messaging, content design, UX/UI writing.

Tools: Notion, Figma.

Problem & Opportunity

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In the app, there's two ways a user can withdraw and deposit money into their investment accounts. Open banking or manual bank transfers. We wanted users to adopt open banking as their go-to payment method as it's a win-win situation for both the business and the user.

For the business, it's the faster, low-cost, and more secure way to handle payments. For the user, it's more automated, seamless and mobile-first.

User story: As a user, I want to understand what the different payment methods are, so that I can make the choice that's best for me.

Business opportunity: how might we educate and empower users to choose open banking as their preferred payment method?

Process

Version 1 of the flow simply outlined the two different ways to make a payment as headers, with a 'recommended' tag above the open banking option.

However, this wasn't enough to drive the level of adoption we were aiming for. Empathising with the user, it became clear that these terms of 'open banking' vs 'manual transfer', on their own, didn't mean much to the user, and is arguably financial jargon.

My role was to translate complex financial processes into value-led propositions that did the following:

1. educate the user on what each payment method is so they have full transparency and autonomy over their choice.

2. explain the benefit of open banking to the user, in a way that's relevant to their own goals (rather than just the business').

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Impact

The new, optimised flow that led with with both user-centric and benefit-driven content increased the adoption rate of open banking over manual transfers by 39%.

Learnings & reflections

When working in specialised industries like fintech, it's easy to accumulate both industry and internal company jargon over time. It's important to step back to make sure that our product speaks the way its users speak.