Verse — Product Design
The social side of payments.
Intro —
Verse is a payments app focused on GenZ. Our goal is to find the social side of banking to offer the new generations an experience that truly fits the way they handle money. In this case, I wanted to tell the whole story of my work since I joined the company, rather than focusing on a single project.
I came to Verse in January 2022 to form and lead the Design team, setting the foundations and practices of Product Design within the organisation as smoothly as possible.
The team was easily integrated within the squads for continuous and specialised sprint work, spanning from early exploration phases to implementation and final Q&A. The Research area was centralised, doing discovery work and channelling the voice of the user to provide continuous insights to both the product team and the rest of the organisation.
Foundations —
Establishing a Design System.
Although one of Verse’s goals was to redesign the application, the company did not have a Design System in place. Each designer and developer was starting their work from scratch sprint after sprint, which obviously resulted in design inconsistencies and crazy lines of code throughout the application.
So we prioritised this task and worked very hard with the Design and Front-End team to identify, simplify and homogenise all the components in use and apply them to all the key screens and processes.
We did the same with copy and illustrations to eliminate all inconsistencies and create a coherent and user-friendly and, thanks to a huge team effort, we achieved the goal in less than 2 months. Its implementation improved the consistency of the experience and considerably reduced work times, while still integrating the maintenance of the system as a step in the design process.
Channelling the User's voice.
When I came to Verse, I was impressed by how easy it was to access data and how close we could get to the customer. But, despite having a number of extremely valuable sources, this data was not channelled and centralised, so it wasn’t translating into value for the company.
As resources were limited, we decided to divide the responsibility between the different members of the team and pool them in a bi-weekly ceremony we called Product4Users.
In this way, the Product Manager would bring an analysis of usage data extracted from Looker and GA, the Researcher would bring data from interviews with Ambassadors and insights from our Discord community and user testing, and a User Happiness lead assigned to each squad would bring the main problems and complaints from users.
All insights were documented and classified as pills in a new research repository, bugs in our developers’ backlog or new opportunities within the idea bank.
In parallel, we launched a customised version of the NPS focusing mainly on all aspects of the application related to Design (ease of use, appearance, trust and loyalty) and making more detailed divisions of the information (by functionality, by type of user, by country, …) on which we could later go deeper with qualitative interventions.
Struggling with Compliance.
I think one of the main challenges in Fintech is to try to create a simple and frictionless experience without having regulatory problems. It takes a lot of patience, creativity and logic to do this.
As Verse was born as a simple payment application before the establishment of the PSD2 regulation, we have had to deal with a lot of regulatory challenges during this time but we have successfully implemented all the processes related to 3DS, two-factor authentication or SCA and especially everything related to customer identification.
Given its impact on the onboarding of new customers, we worked very hard to implement a simple process that could be completed by the user at different times, so as not to impact the user in their first experience and allow them to discover the good things about the application while it is still warm.
We have optimised this flow as much as possible from the first IDV implementation (in a bit of a rush and with the licence at stake) until today, increasing the number of users completing the process by 20%.
Product Design —
More than payments.
During this time, Verse has evolved from a payment application to a simple banking concept that attracts customers thanks to a complete value proposition: we implemented advanced payment options, developed a rewards system to generate card stickiness, implemented savings rules, improved group balance management and developed new features within Events functionality to generate new monetisation opportunities.
Initiative #1
Increasing inflows with Auto-Add Money
Context: All money spent with the VerseCard first needs to be manually added to the app. This is cumbersome and annoying (the average VerseCard user manually tops up around 7 times per month). Additionally, ~20% of VerseCard payments and ~60% of direct debits fail due to insufficient balance.
Objective: Increase the inflow per MTU (monthly transacting user) by further reducing the friction of adding money to Verse.
Results: The results were not as good as we had hoped, so we pivoted the functionality so that deposits could be configured by frequency rather than quantity. So we did manage to increase money-in per user by an average of €40 and the number of top-ups per month by more than 30%.
Initiative #2
Enhancing the payment experience with Scheduled Payments
Context: Based on the most frequent group names (“Netflix” and “Spotify”) we know that people often use Verse to share recurring expenses. Additionally, metrics show that after deposits, p2p transactions are by far the most frequent in the app, so enriching this feature is a great added value to the product.
Objective: Enabling users to schedule payments and to send them on a recurring basis (e.g. weekly, monthly) will positively contribute to increasing MTUs and retention.
Results: We create a simple and frictionless flow within the P2P process. 3 months after launch, the feature achieved a 22% adoption rate (10% higher than our KPI) and contributed significantly to the increase in the average amount of money added to the Verse balances.
Initiative #3
Boosting the VerseCard with Cashback
Context: 70% of the users were already using cashback in other apps, so we needed to create a reward program that would generate stickiness to our card. We build a system non based on direct cashback, so it was unclear to the user when he would get his reward.
Objective: We base the KPI on increasing retention of MTUs and the design challenge on clearly presenting to the user where, how and how much they should buy to get their reward.
Results: We improve the visibility of merchants and the progress of each reward in the app and work hand in hand with the Marketing team to generate noise and campaigns around our brands. As a result, the retention of users with cashback increased by 20%.
Initiative #4
Events: Spending money is better with friends
Context: Events was one of the most popular social features of Verse app since the beginning, especially during covid times. But, despite being a feature with a very high monetisation potential, its usage was decreasing month by month. Users couldn't find the feature in the app and those who did, didn't understand how to use it.
Objective: Improve the visibility of the feature and make changes to the architecture and presentation of the content to increase the number of MTUs and start monetising the service.
Results: We earned 12% more than planned in 6 months, and 34% of all created events were monetised. The number of MTUs (monthly transacting users) involved in Monetised Events increased by 70% more than the KPI.
Discovery & Hands-On
Social Banking, Gen-Z and their “circles”
In parallel to the product improvements, in the product leadership area, we launched a research project on Generation Z and their relationship with money.
When it comes to money, this generation is heavily influenced by their parents, so many of the insights we gained were not as different as we had hoped. However, we did learn a lot of valuable things:
We used the first insight to implement convenient savings options for them, turn rewards around and make it easier to claim money from a friend without being "embarrassed".
We reviewed all copies of the app and worked in depth with users to understand the trust blackspots within the app and how to resolve them.
And finally, I personally worked on some explorations on the concept of "circles of trust" to make our app closer to WhatsApp than Revolut.
About migration.
Verse was acquired by Block (formerly Square) in 2020. The goal was to use Verse as a base and springboard to launch CashApp in Europe, so in 2023 we "froze" the development of new features to focus on defining a migration strategy that would be as smooth as possible for the user.
As the applications are similar in terms of functionality, we worked together with the CashApp Design team in New York to define an intermediate style (something like a blue CashApp) based on the new navigation architecture that Cash was working on.
We developed a new branch of Mooncake (Cash's design system) to build and adapt component variants and generated a prototype that allowed us to validate with users some hypotheses about the most important changes.
We called this project Cashify and phased the changes to gradually move closer to CashApp until finally the technical complexity of the project gave a twist to the overall strategy of the company and they decided to leave the migration on standby.
Conclusion —
What I took away with me.
The change from a large, traditional company like Bankinter, with many products and a commercial focus, to a startup like Verse with a single application and a product focus was rough at first.
However, during all this time I have learned a lot about that product-centric culture where everything is based on data, including design decisions. It has been very rewarding to see the growth of the team, the product and the impact of our work on the KPIs quarter by quarter.
And finally, I think that working with people spread all over the world in an asynchronous but excellently coordinated way has made me grow a lot and is, along with the results, one of the best things about my experience at Verse.
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