Advance
We created Advance to try and remove the need for payday loans. By offering people an advance on their next month's salary for a small, flat fee as opposed to sky high interest rates, we're able to help people cover unexpected costs without them needing to resort to high cost debt.
Advance lets you access up to 50% of your earned salary for a flat fee of £1.49 per advance. Meaning if you're paid £100 a day and you've worked 4 days this month, you would be able to take an advance of £200 for £1.49.
The fee and the money you've advanced is then deducted from your salary on payday, so there are no late repayments.
Problem
Salary Finance is an Employee Benefit provider that partners with employers around the world in order to help their employees become financially healthier.
Salary Finance offers a range of financial products linked to the employee's salary. From low cost loans repaid through your salary, to early access to your salary and savings accounts that make saving easy and rewarding.
When I first joined Salary Finance, our 2 biggest problems were onboarding new clients and marketing our core product to existing client’s employee base. Through research with existing and potential clients we discovered that their biggest problem was that they didn’t want to be seen to be promoting debt to their employees.
So we began to look for other ways we could help their employees become more financially secure and demonstrate to employers that we were a complete solution to their employees financial problems.
Role
I was Lead Product Designer on this project, working alongside a PM, Lead Engineer, Head of Operations, Head of Product and the COO. We’d also just hired a junior UI/UX designer and I was mentoring them through this process.
Research
I put together a research brief in order to find out what problems people were having. One of the areas we wanted to investigate was payday loans as we had seen the impact that they have on people’s lives through our other research. Some of the research methods we used were:
Face to face interview
Surveys
Market & competitor Research
What we found out
From our research and synthesis, we were able to spot trends across a segment of our potential users as well as create a new persona.
People were often running out of money and having to borrow from payday lenders and credit card overdrafts.
People were borrowing payday loans as a safety net.
People didn’t understand interest and how much it was costing them.
People were budgeting rigorously but still getting caught off guard by unexpected costs.
User Problem
Then as a team we aligned on the problem that we believed that by solving, gave us the best chance of achieving our business outcomes, before writing it up as a problem statement.
“People with no savings who regularly run out of money before payday need to be able to make it to payday without incurring expensive costs because, despite budgeting they often run out of money when unexpected costs present themselves.”
Solution
I then ran brainstorming sessions where we reframed the problems we’d highlighted before brainstorming how we could solve them. Making sure to stay aligned as a team by voting and combining ideas. We then wrote up ideas as hypotheses:
We believe that giving people with no savings who regularly run out of money before payday
the ability to take advances on their next payday for a flat fee
they will be able to make it to payday without having to borrow expensive debt
in turn helping us demonstrate to employers that we’re solving a real problem for their staff
we'll know this is true when we see an increase in pitch wins
Assumption Mapping
Before moving to design, I ran an assumption mapping session to highlight our riskiest assumptions and unknowns. We then brainstormed how best to answer these outstanding questions in order to move forward with confidence.
Some of the things that came out of that session were:
Will employers want this for their employees?
Can we know exactly how much a user has earned at a given point in their pay cycle?
Will employers/employees see this is a loan?
Will employees understand how this product works?
Can we price this in a way that works for the employee as well as Salary Finance?
Will this enable bad habits or create a debt cycle?
Answering our riskiest unknowns
We then set about finding answers to our riskiest unknowns.
Competitor & market research
Prototypes & Usability Testing
Sales Pitches
Surveys
User Story Mapping
In order to answer some of our outstanding questions we needed a prototype to put in front of potential end users. To start this process I ran an initial User Story Mapping session with the team, where we outlined the high level steps a user would need to take in order to get early access to their salary.
Then for each step we would come up with ideas on how to help the user achieve them, which data points we might need as well as any questions or ideas we had. Next, we started to discuss and define what we would take into our MVP solution, leaving other ideas, features and functionality to go into the roadmap for validation at a later date.
Flows & Wireframes
From our high level User Story Map with descriptions of functionality and listed data points, it’s then easy to start to create wireframes and flow diagrams. Working closely with the Lead Engineer and PM to come up with the design together.
Prototype & Test
Once we had a signed off first version I turned it into an interactive prototype which used to run multiple rounds of usability tests with people who fit our personas, iterating between rounds.
Some of the things that came out of the things that came out of our research were:
People weren’t clear why they had to set up a direct debit
People weren’t clear on how their available to advance was calculated
People weren’t aware they could type in a value instead of using the slider
I also created a Customer Journey Map that aligned to the MVP and visualised the feedback we gained from rounds of usability testing in order to highlight pain points and opportunities while also remaining aware of the business goals at each stage of the journey. This also helped to keep the team aligned on what needed working on and what our users were saying.
Evaluation
After launch we conducted lots of research to understand how and why people were using the product, as well as to keep an eye one whether we were enabling bad habits or creating debt cycles. Some of the research methods included:
Analytics Reviews
User Interviews
Surveys
Outcome
Advance turned out to be our second most profitable product.
It helped us onboard a number of new clients as well as reach a new segment of employees from existing clients.
Although less profitable than our core product seen higher take up of Advance which gives us a bigger pool of users to market to.
A number of similar propositions popped up and started to approach our clients which could have gone terribly if we didn’t already have a solution.
The vast majority of use cases for Advance are productive, such as vehicle repairs, vet bills and unexpected bills.
Although we see people sign in to advance on average twice per pay cycle, Advances are taken far less frequently. After conducting research to figure out why this may be, we discovered that people often sign in just so see how much they could advance if they needed to. Giving them reassurance and peace of mind.