Digital wallet experience - Cowrywise Stash

Cowrywise is a savings and investment product that helps Nigerians save and invest for their goals with as little as $1. To help users build better savings habits, Users are able to set a maturity date three months from the day they create a plan, after their savings plan have matured, they are then able to withdraw into their bank accounts or reinvest.

Project Details

My Role

I worked on the end to end design process of the mobile app, worked with the designer for the web app to ensure consistency. I also worked with the different stakeholders to ensure cross- collaboration.

Year

2019

Team

Myself, Two Mobile Engineers, One Product Managers, Customer Success team.

Problem Space

Users want a way to be able to withdraw their funds whenever they want but they can’t because their savings is locked for a minimum of three months.

What problem were we trying to solve?

In order to provide interest to the users, the company invests the funds they get from the users so the funds have to be locked for a minimum of 3 months. Customer retention was very important to us, so we wanted to add a bit of flexibility to the product by building a feature that lets users withdraw whenever they want.
This means that if users want to easily access money, they won’t earn interest, you’re probably wondering why they just don’t keep the money in their bank accounts since they won’t be earning interest right? In Nigeria, traditional banks charge ridiculous fees from their users for various reasons. We saw a way to increase our user base by offering users a digital wallet where they can keep their money and make transfers to any bank account half the price of what traditional banks were offering.

Goal

Create a digital wallet that allows users fund and withdraw from it at anytime - STASH

Our offerings

Free transfers to savings and investment plan
Low transfer fee to bank accounts
Wallet funding by bank transfers and debit cards
Free transfers to other cowrywise users
Zero maintenance fees

How did we solve this problem?

While designing this feature, two things that were really important to me was Ease of access and Security.

Since this was supposed to be a wallet different from your savings and investment plan (if you have any) you needed a way to fund that wallet, so we introduced virtual bank account numbers for every user, a user could simply fund their Stash by making a bank transfer to the virtual account number attached to their wallet.

Getting Started with Stash

We wanted to introduce this feature to our users by showing them Stash’s unique selling points and how it’ll benefit them so I created onboarding screens to help ease users in.

Onboarding

One of the setbacks we foresaw was that since this money isn’t locked, anybody else apart from the user could transfer money out of their account. To help reduce the risk of this happening, we introduced the creation of a 4 digit PIN before you can use this feature for existing users,This PIN can then be used to complete transfers.

New users were asked to create their 4 digit PINs during the point of account creation which I wrote about here

Making Transactions

I designed a seamless transfer experience that allows users make transfers to their saving and investment plans, their bank accounts and other cowrywise users.

Transfers

Conclusion

This feature was a massive hit as users were excited to move their money out of their bank accounts and into a more secure place.
After launching we had a 20% increase in the AUM as users started to fund their stash and perform various transactions.
It was a win-win at the end of the day as users found a place to keep their funds and at the same time enjoy reduced transfer fees on their transfers also for the company as they were able to make money off those transfer fees.

eniola aminu