Popular playbooks for building new product features take us through familiar processes: identify value opportunity, deliver and iterate on solutions. How can we adapt these processes to the specificities of embedding financial features? From our experience building unique financial flows with over 50 companies, an effective path is quite clear. Here, we've broken it down into 3 steps.
1. Know your customer and scope product needs
If you're customer centric, starting and ending everything with your customer will feel familiar. A good starting point for embedding finance is answering a deceptively simple question:
How can my platform make my customers’ lives easier?
That’s right, before opening bank accounts or planning a pay-with-a-click button, you’ll have to deep dive into your customers’ needs. Run surveys, get direct feedback, identify relevant consumer segments, generate product usage data, and evaluate pains and motivations throughout the customer journey. In possession of this revealing information, think about what really advances your value proposition.
What brings my product closer to my company’s ultimate vision?
By sticking close to your values and executing on a validated hypothesis, you’ll be able to level-up your users experience with purposeful features.
2. Assess potential costs and impact
You don’t want to go investing money (and time!) in something you’re still not confident about in terms of return. Your business case needs to be bullet-proof. Of course, your profitability will vary according to the features and financial flows you have in mind. Start ideating and back up your business case with projections based on data:
– Number of potential users
– Number of likely adopters in the first year
– Potential value for the user
– Monetization potential
When assessing development costs, keep in mind most of our partners have been able to launch an early version of their product in just 4-6 weeks with 1 product manager and 2 developers. And remember your scope: you won't be able to fit all the desired banking features in at once. Dream big, build small, and carve your way to the MVP - the notorious Minimum Viable Product.
3. Build and launch a banking MVP
Once you have a general idea of what you’d like to achieve with your first financial product, it’s time to understand how fast and how cheap you could launch this first MV. The way to go is to test risky assumptions as cheaply and as early as you can.
Finally, it’s time to build! Call your developers, dive into BaaS documentation, and start integrating. If you really want to launch fast, you can count on no-code white-labeled banking apps. Or, let your developers take customisation even further with APIs. Once you're ready to launch your MVP, it’s important to perform a compliance check to ensure your project follows banking regulation (if you're working with Swan, we do this for you.)
When you’re close to launching, make sure to test it out with loyal beta customers — users always know best. You might believe the set of 7 features your research suggested is what your users want, but you don’t really know for sure until the product is out there. Afterall, people interact with digital products in surprising ways.
By launching quickly, getting instant feedback, and tracking user behavior, you will better orient your product development. And remember to communicate: make sure your users know all about your new features and the benefits of using them, to ensure adoption. After your first bank offering takes off, you'll be empowered to iterate with more and more financial features along the way. Build based on your users' behaviour and you'll end up with a killer product.
Building your MVP with the right partner
It’s not always easy to understand the complexity of different payment capabilities.
That’s why it’s important to pick the right partner who will guide you through product development, integration, and launch. Someone to help you ideate around your product vision and give advice on how to make the most of different financial features.
Talk to one of our experts and start building your banking product today.
