PRODUCT CASE STUDY & UX PROPOSAL — Building a Modern Super Fintech App for Nigerians
What is a super app?
According to Wikipedia “A super-app is a mobile or web application that can provide multiple services including payment and financial transaction processing”. It’s basically an app that provides a seamlessly integrated experience.
Unlike most fintech apps and traditional banks in Nigeria that offer a one-dimensional approach to banking, the super fintech app builds a solution for different customer audiences, collects data, and aggregates personalized customer experience.
An Example of a Super app is We-Chat in China and Grab in Southeast Asia.
The problem with most traditional banking systems in Nigeria is that they're often tedious and frustrating to interface with. For a generation that’s passionate about seamless awesome user-based experience, what we currently have is a microscope of what can be. Hence the super app!
Potential Financial Super Apps are already here
Some financial market players in the Nigerian banking and fintech industry have already begun to take their first steps in this direction. In particular, Alat by Wema has an ecosystem that provides users and businesses with certain features and products, like the ability to create a domiciliary dollars account from the app or schedule multiple recurrent transfers.
Alat-by-Wema is free, has 1 million-plus download, mostly for millennials, and has a 3.7 rating.
In 2021 Chipper set its sights on Nigeria, their app helps you Send and receive money the fast and easy way. Transfer funds across town and across Africa, right from your mobile phone. Curiously they also help you with Shopping online for the “perfect accessory” using their card, whilst giving you 5% cash back.
Chipper is free, has 1 million-plus downloads, mostly for millennials, and has a 4.2 rating.
So the vision for a super fintech app is one I’ve harbored for a while. I have visualized how this can be achieved through aggregating and integrating third-party products and features via APIs.
For this project, we’ll be exploring some important banking trends, technologies, and Hypotheses.
- Gamification
- Great Design and Experience leveraging APIs, Cloud, and Big Data
- Financial Market place
The architecture for this super app will be based on users, family, friends, products, and money elements.
For the Ux process the stages we’ll undergo for this super fintech app are :
In summary, the stages are determining who our primary users are and their typical scenarios; creating surveys; determining what the functionality of our app would look like; creating a sustainable data and information architecture whilst exploring the technologies explained above to curate a clear user financial path and delightful design experience.
Also very important is our user persona, which helps us identify our user’s goals, frustrations, and identity.
Proposed Features and Technology
- Gamification: the simple goal of infusing this technology is to make interfacing with finances exciting. After interacting with a small sample of users, most of them all came to the conclusion that most Nigerian banking and fintech interfaces lag and offer a dreadful experience.
What we can provide from our app is an integration of financial experience that brings fun and positive emotions to the user using gamification.
“Gamification is the craft of deriving fun and engaging elements found typically in games and thoughtfully applying them to real-world or productive activities.” — Yu kai Chou
So what we can do here is integrate gaming elements by creating reward points in the user panel area. These would be given when certain experiences are tried or shared, or when savings and investment milestones are met. These could be useful for marketing as it engineers a virality and reward system.
2. Great Design and Experience (UI/UX): Curating amazing customer service through our app is very important and a functional UX and experiential UI contribute to that. Our mission is simply to create an awesome banking experience for our users for any type of account.
For this super app, all types of accounts from different banks could be connected here, while the user gets overall insights and reports from this simple and easy-to-navigate interface.
Big Data and Api’s from other fintech would help smoothen these processes.
Also, our data, although limited confirms this
3. Integrate Financial Market Place: Usually, the core banking services revolve around sending and receiving money. We can improve this by creating and curating a variety of different financial portfolios they can invest in, including the Nigerian stock.
A lot of young Nigerians would love an app where they can easily move money from that app to invest in a stock or investment portfolio, without leaving it. Also, there’s the part of associated brand integrity. If Nigerians trust you enough to open an account with you, they wouldn't mind investing as well.
The truth is some of these banks already run such for high stake clients traditionally, why not make it mainstream on the app.
Conclusion
Honestly, the future is here and not in front of us. We are seeing the banking industry in Nigeria being disrupted, as evidenced by the market valuation of recent fintech like kuda, chipper, etc. This report is meant to encourage the traditional players as well as those joining to up their game and build for the burgeoning modern audience, Millenials and Gen Z’s, whilst creating an awesome financial experience for them.
The super app feature suggestions are not limited to the three mentioned above, from personalized experiences driven by AI, personal finance management, voice technology, credit-driven loans for essentials like houses and cars, automated bills, and quick payments to integration with social networks. There’s a whole lot of future for the fintech super app! So Join me build this future! <Definitely feel like Steve Jobs right now>
Images for proposal curated from Wema, Chipper, and UXDA’s App.
