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Things to know when designing for Fintech
For the past few years, I’ve been working as a Product Designer for two challenger banking apps in the UK: Monzo and Monese. While the first one is UK-centric, the latter is geared towards Europe and operates in 12 languages.
These challenger banks— or ‘neo’ banks as they’re also called — typically have no physical branches and place mobile apps at the heart of everything they do. This helps to eliminate market entry barriers by creating a location-agnostic demand for financial services.
Activities that once were needed to be completed via a local branch — like opening a new current account, sending a payment, receiving money, or talking to customer service— are now handled solely within the app.
However, designing experiences for this innovative and fascinating sector can be quite challenging! 😱
What follows are my key takeaways.
Facing compliance and regulations
Banking is a highly regulated sector and banks and e-money providers (services like Monese or TransferWise which offer accounts but don’t hold a banking license) must obtain certain information from potential customers in order to verify their identity before starting a relationship with them.
The two big boxes that need to be checked before opening an account are:
- Know Your Customer (KYC) related-information needs to be obtained. This ensures the customer is who they say they are.
- Anti-Money-Laundering (AML) checks have to pass and are constantly monitored even after the account is opened. These checks make sure any money deposited into the account isn’t linked to illegal activities such as fraud, money laundering, or terrorism.
Once established, the verified financial identity will underpin the ongoing customer’s activity.
As opposed to other apps, the speed of setting up an account is a key value proposition for challenger banks. That said, due to the legal requirements mentioned above, the registration procedure can be quite involved: it requires…
