The world of finance is expanding and it is incorporated into the different products we use in our day-to-day lives, customers are requesting more and more every day, with the mindset of making it easier to bank, carry out transactions, save funds for the future, request for loans to settle quick monetary issues or build a house for themselves and families while also having an insurance plan as back-up. This is what the LetsGo App is all about, a one-stop digital mall for all your monetary purposes. Letshego is a financial corporation with footprints in 11 African countries with a single aim of making finance easily available and accessible to its customers in its individual markets.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, when business operations stood still, it was difficult for companies to reach their customers because of the lack of digital access, this reason birthed the initiative for an all-in-one digital mall for Letshego. This platform would support Loans, Payments, Savings, Insurance, Marketplace and Telemedicine. The physical operations of the organization were moved to become digital in order to make it easier for it customers to have access to loans and make transactions.

We conducted research to identify if the customers would likely use a digital product as opposed to coming into the branch every time they need a loan, we also considered the age range/demography of the target audience who currently have one or more products with Letshego, of which are young adults and older male and female from the ages of 35-60. We got different insights into how the customers would perceive the transition of the physical process into the digital space, some of the reports that stood out are listed below.

Customers want convenience.

Customers want ease of access to the loan without any form of tampering.

Customers want the same experience if not a better one on the app.

So we set out to build with the feedback from the customers, coupled with the existing business insights we collected which we properly went through and dissected in order to get more customer pain points.

I contributed to designing 7 unique products for the LetsGo platform, these products range from:

Payment

Lending

Savings

Insurance

Housing

Admin dashboard

The project is currently live in 11 markets in Africa, there have been multiple enhancements and improvements based on customer feedback, surveys, focus group sessions and user testing sessions.

It made me realize that projects of this magnitude require patience, understanding and a lot of testing, the reason being that a lot of components work together to achieve a particular goal.

I also learned to participate in discovery and ideation sessions while managing the design team that undertook the project. The project introduced me to the agile way of working, managing a large-scale design system, which was my first time being thrown into a large group of brilliant Dev, Po’s, Pm’s, Designers, QA testers etc.

To engage our customers and show them that we have other avenues to access the product such as USSD, WhatsApp and Web, we had to introduce a promotional banner on the mall, this helped in introducing new products and features in the individual markets.

I had no idea I would have to handle multiple market requirements while working on this product, the series of times I had to engage with the regional representatives to better understand what the country needs was really a turning point, I was able to mitigate and coordinate information across representatives and designers.

The next step is to continue stabilizing the products while also introducing new products and features based on customer and business feedback and also increasing the number of users on the product.