Whole Bank_Design Thinking Exercise
Changing the way that you travel one transaction at a time.
A Problem Banking Abroad
Traveling is an act that simultaneously brings joy to many for their ability to gain new experiences both working and adventuring to new places and brings stress from having to deal with the many headaches that go with not having access to the things and services that they have at home. Payments and transactions abroad is one particular service that has the potential to cause such a headache because of the inflexibility of the service that is currently provided. As it stands right now there are only two ways to pay for anything while someone is traveling: either they need to pull out money to carry around with them or use a card.
The Problem
How can individuals do transactions while traveling without using a card or pulling out cash for every transaction they are involved in?
Enter the progressive banking company Whole Bank, whose goal is to make accessing funds while traveling a lot more user friendly and straight forward at the point of purchase. In order to achieve this much more effective method of transacting with foreign businesses, Whole Bank’s Carol Holmes has brought on G Consulting (we) to do investigate what consumers really want and what they are experiencing when they do travel abroad. We did a lot of free form questioning that lead to a lot of different responses, which continually returned to a few key points when asking users what they did and how they felt while traveling:
- Cash was always pulled out initially when the user did not know if the destination would be technologically advanced enough to take card
- Users would rather use card, but felt like they would lose their card more easily than their phone
- Users are open to a digital solution if they required to make any substantial changes for the sake of the digital solution
A Digital Solution
The main thing that we learned after hearing all of the different users is that we should go in a direction that is purely digital. Initial prototypes of the new application asked for disposable cards that the app could write a temporary code on once scanned or imprinted by the phone. This proved difficult in practice as users did not feel comfortable having more physical pieces to carry with them on a trip especially abroad. Another concept that had to be re-worked was the idea around anything too advanced such as a blockchain verification system. Not many businesses at all would even have that solution be an option in regular stores for another decade if it even became commercially acceptable at all. We had one last additional option that allowed users to rely on a randomly generated code to show to the store or restaurant that they were visiting that would correspond to a payment to the merchant that handles the transaction for that store. Although this also seemed impractical to users to have to deal with all these randomly generated numbers for all their transactions.
We decided to create a digital solution that could work with the technology that is already present in the app. The application already has the ability to tell users the closest ATM. We determined that the location services should be taken to the next level and be used to guide the entire transaction. Because the user’s information is already present on the application no additional work will need to be done by the user after this feature is rolled out. Once the user is ready to pay the store would find the user using location services and automatically charge them for the items purchased. A digital receipt would exist to confirm what was bought and clear up any discrepancies with purchases.
While the earlier options may be seem to be safer it requires more action to be taken by the user, and it may be to substantial of a step to take for the user to want to convert to the updated payment method.
Conclusion and Considerations
Our collaboration with Carol’s team allowed us to focus purely on the customer, who would be using this application. We took advantage of that narrow scope to really drill into what Whole Bank customers truly wanted. A solution where the user does not even have to pull out the phone is definitely a solution that limits the amount of work that the user has to do to pay for the items. Moving forward into the future when her team starts beta testing they should definitely consider how to bring on more stores who may not be technologically on par to deal with this type of a service.
My team at G Consulting definitely learned the value of letting the users tell us what they were experiencing instead of sticking directly to a strict set of questions and ideals from the outset. A really important note that I had with my team during the initial stages is to let the ideas fly and not be constrained by the large problem that they thought could potentially derail the solution from having success.
