Breaking Barriers with Fintech: EVO’s DesignOps Story

EVO unlocks financial freedom with instant mobile credit, easy onboarding, and through DesignOps role contributions. We have broken down financial barriers, and increased brand awareness, user growth, and engagement.

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Role

DesignOps

Update

Jan 9, 2024

Client

Trusting Social

Introduction

Traditionally, credit cards have offered convenience, but the application process was a cumbersome burden for individuals with limited incomes or unstable work situations. Enter EVO, a groundbreaking financial technology ecosystem from Trusting Social, aiming to revolutionize the landscape with a 100% online credit card solution designed for inclusivity.

The Challenge

EVO sought to break down the barriers to financial access by:

Eliminating paperwork and income verification: Streamlining the application process online.
Instant approvals: Providing immediate decisions on credit card applications from the comfort of a mobile phone.
Building brand awareness: Attracting new users through strategic partnerships and a memorable onboarding experience.

The Solution

Make paying for deliveries easy by connecting your credit card. It's simple, quick, and ensures a smooth transaction, making customers happy and boosting business success.

EVO implemented a two-phase approach:

Phase 1: Acquisition Stage - Streamlined the customer journey

Partnered with retailers to create seamless landing pages and launched a user-friendly website.
Enabling instant online credit card applications (via a partner banking account) removing cumbersome paperwork and lengthy wait times.

Phase 2: Retention Stage - Take control of your finances

Introduced the EVO payment app, featuring intuitive expense management tools for enhanced user engagement.
Emphasized contactless payment options to promote convenience and security.

DesignOps: Optimizing Efficiency and Impact

To overcome resource constraints and communication bottlenecks, EVO implemented a dedicated DesignOps role, I took on the position focused on enhanced team collaboration: With a centralized design repository and comprehensive guidelines within a single system, developers, designers, product managers, and new team members can enhance knowledge-sharing.

Workflow optimization: Streamlining design processes to save time and improve productivity.
Resource library creation: Curating a collection of essential design tools, design system and assets for quick access and consistent output.
Stakeholder collaboration: Establishing clear communication channels and collaborative workflows to ensure alignment on requirements and goals.

How DesignOps boosts teamwork for more impact?

This presentation illustrates the collaborative efforts of DesignOps with Design teams, enhancing their strength and showcasing the impact of Design strategy. Design strategy involves employing design to tackle complex business challenges and create innovative opportunities. This encompasses understanding user needs, analyzing the competitive landscape, and aligning with the overall objectives of the company.

By using journey mapping, we help our team find ways to make customers happier, more loyal, and, in the end, make our business more successful.

Now that we understand how customers experience our journey, we're all set to create a carefully brand concept. This plan aims to attract, keep, and succeed in our goals.

Through continuous drawing and refining of ideas, we transformed our brand vision into a visually expressive concept. Now, with the completion of our style guide, we are ready to connect with our audience. The guide serves as a helpful tool for maintaining a consistent visual language in partnerships.

Following thorough contemplation and collaborative planning for our digital product, we translated our vision into detailed elements. This ensures consistency, familiarity, and accessibility at every touchpoint, ultimately enhancing the overall customer experience.

DesignOps quickly steps in to establish a resource and library, ensuring that the team is well-prepared and ready to concentrate on solving business problems.

We articulate our collaborative strategy, emphasize essential factors for our work, and specify the approaches used to track performance in optimization..

The primary challenge for DesignOps lies in uniting the product team and implementing Agile principles in the design-to-development process. To ensure alignment, we must create a visual document that facilitates easy communication and ensures everyone is on the same page.

An unforeseen challenge arises when our team utilizes Jira and creates tickets for assignment to the design team. Nevertheless, the marketing team is not accustomed to this process, necessitating DesignOps to discover a method to streamline the workflow.

We decide to establish an MVP Design system and Style guide. This initiative aims to assist designers and developers in maintaining consistency and reusability of components. As a result, it has significantly reduced design debt and enhanced delivery cadence.

We allocate 80% of our efforts to defining global semantic colors, which play a pivotal role in establishing a unified brand image across diverse platforms, products, and materials. This unity fosters trust and reinforces the distinctive personality of the brand.

We developed a typeface called EVO Sans to represent our vision. It was a delightful inaugural experience crafting this typeface, particularly given the limited recognition of type designers in Vietnam. Unfortunately, the lack of feedback in our context has made it challenging to enhance its usability.

We receive feedback from the Product Design team to identify the most essential elements for the project. Subsequently, I plan to create systematic components for a seamless hand-off process.

On the flip side, there is a persistent demand from stakeholders for high-quality graphic design. To address intricate tasks, we have implemented a template for visualizing mockups, effectively minimizing feedback loops. This not only expedites the delivery process but also boosts brand awareness.

The EVO team faces an additional challenge due to the lack of resources for web front-end development. In response, I tasked both the designer and developer with donning multiple hats to collaboratively build a responsive website and landing pages for our partners and EVO products.

We are delighted to be shaping a fundamental feature for the EVO App, which revolves around the capability for credit card payments. The EVO app is currently undergoing development, incorporating a multitude of features.

Results and Impact

Despite a heavy workload, EVO achieved remarkable results within a year:

730 Completed Tickets: The design team, on average, completed 60 tickets per month, exceeding expectations and showcasing exceptional time management.
Highest-Priority Focus: 24% of tickets completed at highest priority, demonstrating the team's ability to prioritize critical tasks.
Minimal Delays: 0.8% of tickets delayed, highlighting excellent progress control.

These achievements directly contributed to EVO's success in achieving its objectives:

Increased brand awareness: Partner channels and a seamless onboarding experience attracted new users.
Streamlined acquisition: Easy online applications fueled cardholder growth.
Enhanced user retention: The EVO app's features and convenience fostered strong user engagement.

Some cool things we did:

Impressive Beginning: Our first major campaign with partner retailer Hoang Ha Mobile was a smash hit, issuing 1,000 credit cards in just 15 days!
App Upgrade: Product Team improved the EVO app for active users, resulting in 1,000 transactions with a 60% success rate, and fast delivery of vouchers.
Future Plans: We aim to issue 180,000 cards in 2024, with a big focus on keeping users engaged in the second phase - Retention.

Conclusion

EVO's innovative approach to financial inclusion demonstrates the power of fintech to reshape the financial landscape. By prioritizing accessibility, optimizing processes, and leveraging effective DesignOps strategies, EVO empowers individuals and sets a new standard for inclusivity in the financial technology world.

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