At ABN AMRO I focused on conceptual work and I was part of innovation teams within Digital Banking. One of the projects, an internal startup, resulted in the Tikkie.me app. An MVP for a peer-to-peer payment app.
The project was initiated as a simplified payment app that could do payments without an IBAN, similar to what competitors were doing. Forcing people to download an app, do a full registration and transfer some money, to be able to do some payments with the new app. So you don’t have to enter an IBAN anymore.
As a team we did not believe in such an approach, so we decided to do it in a different way. The validated learning way. We wanted to understand the real problem people were facing, by doing lots of interviews. And surprisingly the app we were asked to build, would have never offered the solution for the problems people had.
Payments between friends, colleagues and family came out to be a very heavy and serious subject that could even break relationships. We had to do something about this. By making paying someone back easier and more fun.
Do it the validated learning way
Based on the interviews, research and reviewing competitor apps, we came up with a new concept. And we started building and validating it in the shortest time possible. Within two weeks we had a very basic app and some mockups to validate it with users. And we continued iterating and validating the created solutions every two weeks. I did prototyping, interviewing, usability testing and creating questionnaires for this project.
In 3 months we had the concept finished as a native iOS and Android app.
The problem and the solution
During the interviews we discovered the IBAN was not the biggest problem; often you already have the IBAN of your friends or it only takes one text message to get it. The biggest problem was that it takes a lot of time to add the correct information to your mobile banking app payment screen. You’ll have to switch apps multiple times to copy-paste IBAN, amount and description. And you have to type it in yourself. Resulting in people postponing paying others back, in the end totally forgetting about it.
Nobody wants to forget paying back a friend, because then the real problem occurs: it’s really shameful when someone has to ask you twice. Actually, the person that lent you the money is probably very hesitant to ask for a second time.
Our solution was to make paying someone back as simple as possible. It should be possible with only click, which is entering a 5-digit code in your own familiar mobile banking app. And this was done by offering consumers the possibility to create iDEAL payments and sent those to friends via WhatsApp. All the payment information is already pre-filled. Only a confirmation is needed.
And as a bonus, because the payment is done through iDEAL, the requester is instantly notified that the payment is done.
