Overview

PROBLEM

Core Banking Team wanted to improve the No Fee Overdraft (NFO) product to decrease business operation costs, decrease customer call volume, and improve customer problems.  No Fee Overdraft was a feature that allowed customer to have a $50 buffer on their checking account.

• Customer Service Costs: In March 2020, NFO occurred up to $20,000 per month on servicing costs. 

• Lack of Clarity: The complexity around Galileo's ecosystem, UI bugs, and a mix of merchant settlements of NFO left the user confused and not knowing if their Available Balance in their Bank Account was accurate. This led to escalated calls. 

• Increase Limits: In User voice and other customer feedback channels,  the request for a higher buffer was evident.

Research

CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP

As a squad of Design, Product, and Research, we walked through different steps of how our customers would feel and experience taking out an advance and repayment as the first-time user, repeat user, and an infrequent user.  We explored our customer's emotional responses and talked through different touchpoints. 

Key Takeaways: 

• We acknowledged that our customer feels autonomous and in control for this product to be successful.

• Progressively disclosing information will be important, so our customers do not feel overwhelmed by the process.

• Creating transparency and upfront on what happens when you go delinquent.

Ideation

User Flow

After creating the customer journey map, I had enough information to create a user flow to document the high level of this feature to bring to key stakeholders.

This task flow focused on the primary use case: As a user, I will need money in the near future.

The two flows exhibited tasks of taking an advance out and the repayment of the advance.

Prototype and testing

TESTING OUR HYPOTHESISES

I prepared usability questions for our researcher team.

Feedback

As a designer, not only do I listen to UX testing, I take in important information from subject matter experts and stakeholders, like the leadership team, customer support, legal, and risk.

They were part of every step of the process.  Below has examples of key feedback.

Final Designs

MOBILE

DESKTOP

Solution

RESULTS

Since the Varo Advance has launched, the product has been a huge success:

• 53% of people qualified for Varo Advance, took an advance. 

• 5.5% est. loss rate which estimated at 7.9% 

• Varo Advance yielded 33% lower calls per Transaction Active compared to NFO

• Customers who use VA make more debit card transactions per month than non-VA customers, but we do not know (yet) if VA is the driving force.