Financial Management & Digital Banking: A New Proposition (Part 4)
Product-Market Fit Strategy
Previous chapter: Part 3: How do we differentiate ourselves from other competitors?
How to create a banking product that is highly engaging and induce customer retention?
To achieve market-fit, we have to ensure we can retain our users by making them actively engage and interact with our product. This means offering basic functional features are no longer enough, we can not just solve user’s problem in infrequent manner. Because that means, they only use our product in random and as barely needed as possible, thus making our product disposable and replaceable.
What we need to do is to build an engagement mechanism that can generate a signal/stimulus (external trigger) that matches with users’ internal motivation or fear (internal trigger), prompting them to take an action and engage with our product. And this behavior will be then rewarded with a feedback/response that satisfy user needs and internal trigger.
When it is done well and regularly, these mechanism will form a habit that makes our users attached and stay loyal to our product. Here are some mechanism that we can integrate; to not just entice users to frequently open our app, but also to provide rewards that satisfy their psychological needs and make them addicted to our app.
Product Concept
Example of Features
Make customer’s life goals as the foundation of the product to makes the product valuable and essential to user
Solves product-fit and market-fit through value desirability
Get as much information on users to gain in depth understanding on their needs, goals, motivation, financial condition and behavior (preferences and habits in spending and savings), their investment profile and anything that can help us provide the most sophisticated financial management and advisory experience
- As part of the on-boarding process, we asks users to fill their personal information to capture their needs and goals, their current financial situation and what they want to achieve, behavioural data, etc to enable us set:
- Their first saving and budgeting goal based on their needs and goals
- Timeline and target milestones based on their financial condition (goal, income, debt, estimation of monthly/weekly spending, etc)
- Spending tracking preference based on their behaviour and habits (categories of their shopping, daily and monthly consumption needs, lifestyle choices, etc)
Embed financial literacy as part of a fun gamified experience, and as an education that enable users to maximize their life potentials
Demonstrate how this is needed as part of their future plan / to help them achieve their dreams
- Give relevant, real-time financial advices based on users’ financial condition, for example reminding users in cutting back snacking/leisure spending at a specific time where they usually buy snacks.
- Deliver financial education in bite-sized, engaging storytelling experience → see Jouska’s instagram stories
- Discourage bad behavior not by punishments (reducing their points / downgrade their achievements), but by comparing their current progress with their past and better progress, or with other users’ achievements. This will trigger their needs to compete with others and not missing out (FOMO)
- Making saving goals, budgeting target and spending tracking as interesting challenges/tasks that can be done daily and achievable (by breaking down the target and timeline as reachable milestone). Every completion will also be rewarded with congratulatory messages and reward points
- Create social competition by providing social media mechanism (ability to post story, share, and giving likes and comments) to the social feed platform
- Engagement that shows social values: People are social creatures. No matter how ambitious and individualistic a person may be, but people are more susceptible to change their behavior when they are motivated not just by their own personal goal, but also with social causes. For example, we can give encouraging messages that show how their spending and saving habits are also contributing positively to Indonesian economy (by saving and doing investment, they are funding the government’s resources for initiatives that help infrastructure building and fuel economy growth).
Embed a social mechanism that makes some experience becomes shareable and allows users to build communities around the product
Build a community into our product ecosystem
Have a social feed feature that serves as a micro-blogging platform where content is generated from internal staff and users themselves. This social feed serves 3 purposes:
- As a tool to enable users to share their personal finance story, which satisfy their need to share their opinion and express themselves
- As a content generator that provides endless entertainment and engagement (from internal writers and other users)
- As a platform that facilitates social interaction, building a sense of community and induce social competition. Users can give likes and comments to content, and their activities also accumulate and compound their reward points, which will encourage users to stay active and frequently interact with others.
- Feature an achievement scoring boards that compares users’ progress compared their previous achievement, or compare it with their friends/relatives’ achievements. Due to privacy concern, it may not be wise to show the amount of the savings, but rather we can show how many saving streaks they have achieved or how is their progression compared to others.
Next Chapter: Part 5: Business Model, Marketing Strategy, UI UX
