Our client had an objective of creating a secure and user-friendly money transfer platform, enabling users to make financial transactions by smartphone. The platform had to allow financial services to be extended to non-banking people at a lower cost. The client, therefore, wished to hire a team of professional developers for developing a prototype for the users quickly. We accepted and successfully tackled the challenge.
The big question in mind while developing BongaPay was:
How was BongaPay supposed to revamp the financial model in developing countries, severely constrained by the physical infrastructure of the financial institutions?
To find out the answers, we monitored the physical infrastructure of the financial institutions in developing countries and found that a large part of their population was excluded from the formal banking system.
Kenya has less than 1000 bank branches and approx. 2000 ATMs are certainly not sufficient for 45 million people. BongaPay was to be made accessible to ordinary Kenyans and further help these financial institutions and telecoms to dig deeper into remote areas quickly without increasing the setup infrastructure there.
With poor people gaining access to financial services, their cash flow management, financial planning and saving will automatically improve, bringing many unbanked customers under the formal financial system.
Since the application had to support the transfer of financial information, developing a highly secure app was the main motive. Another challenge was to synchronize the real-time data between the mobile app & website and develop a world-class UI for easy navigation for laymen.
The solution comprised a secure application framework, a dedicated mobile wallet service, and connectivity with mobile banking applications of listed banks. Users could link bank debit cards to the wallet using their registered phone number to initiate P2P transactions. There was also an option to attach a short message, delivered along with the payment notification. Users could check their account balance as well as their recent transactions. The wallet application gave a ‘fast and easy-to-reach platform’ for users, for P2P money transfers.
Some of the features in the BongaPay app are as follows:
● Send Money to Phone Contacts: This app can send money to other apps by his/her phone number, entering the amount, and choosing the source account. Users can choose to send money from their wallets or specific credit/debit cards attached to the app.
● Multilingual Support: It provides a basic selection of language during registration.
● Multi-Currency Support : The app has multi-currency support for users, sending and receiving money internationally.
● Loyalty Program for Users :Users will always be rewarded with redeemable points for monetary value when using and transacting through the app.
● Free Chat/Audio/Video Calling and Group Calling : Bongapay allows users to send pictures and audio messages to their contacts.
● Split bills : The app allows users to split bills and pay their bills according to the amount split by users.
● Fingerprint-enabled login : The app has the option of a login password, screen pattern, and fingerprint to log in for maximum security.
The following step-by-step process was employed while developing this app-
We engaged in active interactions with enterprises that wanted to integrate money transfer mobile apps into their growing infrastructure. We studied their personal and business profiles and understood their needs and their challenges
We consolidated all aspects of the project and listed the goals of banks, vendors, and customers, and aligned them onto a concept that sorted each one of them.
Based on our reported map, we drafted proto-personas. This was an essential step for defining user types and their expectations. This helped us devise the wireframes that would work best for the money transfer mobile app and keep the ideation process according to the users
We converted all our insights into information architecture and came up with the most pleasant design that would make transactions and intra-app navigation easier without compromising the transparency of the product
Our developers are experts in playing with HTML, CSS, and Jquery languages, using these languages efficiently. We defined the user flows and sketched the corresponding wire flows on a whiteboard and then made them clickable.
We embarked on developing a platform that could work efficiently and improve customer experience in the modern world by touching a button. Our team achieved exactly the same.
Four pillars of this project – Developers, Bankers, Vendors, and Users were involved in the testing part. Their feedback helped us a lot in making changes, adding to the robustness of the product. After the beta version, the final version was launched well before time.
Tests revealed that the platform allowed the users to have an amazing experience. Displaying ‘actionable insights’ in a clear way was well received by the users. The client was delighted to see the functionality of BongaPay. The app served as the bridge between traditional Fintech Apps and its future counterparts.
