Designing a P2P investment product

What is Spenny Wise?

In the midst of the volatile market in 2022, our team at Spenny introduced Wise as a solution for those seeking stable investment options. As the market experienced a steep decline, Wise emerged as a reliable and secure choice for those looking to safeguard their money.

Spenny Wise is a peer-to-peer investment product that promises up to 10% stable returns p.a. at relatively low risk.

My role

I led the design team and I was involved in every step of the process. In the beginning, my role was more about guiding and reviewing the team's work. However, as the project progressed, I took on a more hands-on role. I was responsible for handling user feedback and making changes to the product, based on that feedback. I also introduced a Wise SIP investment option.

The team

2 product designers, 1 product manager, 3 engineers, 1 motion designer

Timeline

March 2022 - June 2022

Project kickoff

As I already mentioned that Wise was born out of necessity in the midst of the volatile market in 2022. Our business and product team brainstormed on bunch of product ideas, and P2P lending services seemed to be the most promising out of all, considering its zero-relevance with the market volatility, stable returns and frictionless activation.

By the time, we started working on Wise, we had our design guideline in place and we kicked off the project with few goals in mind.

User trust: Since we were bringing a new investment asset on the platform, we wanted our users to feel safe and trust us with their hard-earned money. [daily interest, easy withdrawals and knowledge screens]

Easy of activation: Unlike mutual funds, which takes a good number of steps to complete the activation, we wanted Wise to have a very short activation process.

Easy of investment: We wanted our users to be able to complete the investment in minimum number of steps possible, while keeping them informed at each step of the process.

Phase 1

Color palette, illustrations and Wise logo

“Wise logo, 3D Illustrations and animations of this project were designed by Palak Jain.”

Phase 1

Activation process

To keep the activation process of Wise shorter, we introduced a new flow altogether. Our existing users who have already completed their Mutual fund KYC, they didn’t have to go through the activation of Wise. But for new users, this shorter activation process served as a quick way to get started with the investments, instead of going through our existing KYC process for mutual funds. We called it “Mini KYC”.

Here’s the flow for Mini KYC.

Our team designed the Mini KYC flow into 3 simple steps:

PAN number information

Address information

Personal information

Phase 1

Wise investment and portfolio screens

To keep the activation process of Wise shorter, we introduced a new flow altogether. Our existing users who have already completed their Mutual fund KYC, they didn’t have to go through the activation of Wise. But for new users, this shorter activation process served as a quick way to get started with the investments, instead of going through our existing KYC process for mutual funds. We called it “Mini KYC”.

Here’s the flow for Mini KYC.

Phase 1

Launch and impact

With internal testing gone well, our team was all set for the launch. I also worked on product launch emailers and marketing graphics.

Link to the launch video created by Anurag Dixit.

Within a month of launch, Wise became the most preferable investment asset on our platform resulting in an AUM of more than 80 lakhs.

In the midst of the volatile market, our users found Wise as an stable investment option and around 30% of the users switched their automatic roundup investments from mutual funds and digital gold to Wise.

Upon talking to users, we got to know that users were also using Wise as a safe place to build their emergency fund. Crediting the daily interest into user’s portfolio and quick withdrawals became two of the most promising factors that helped us gain the trust of our users in this new product.

“Wise also emerged out as a preferred investment option for most of our users as it provided almost 2x returns to traditional bank FDs and lesser lock-in period.

Compared to our P2P competitors, Wise provided better returns on investment and that too with very minimal ticket size of ₹100.”

Phase 2 of the project

After the successful launch of Wise, now it was time for us to work on retention and scale Wise to yet another level. We launched SIP in Wise a few weeks later to help our business in retaining the users. With SIP, users were now able to invest their money automatically on specified time intervals.

In Wise SIP, users can set the AutoPay for automatic periodic investments. We started off with UPI mandate to help users set their AutoPay. UPI mandate only allows to start SIP of amount less than or equal to ₹5,000.

With the launch of Wise SIP, we started collecting feedback from our users and also noticed the increase in retention. Yet, there was a missing element in this launch of Wise SIP and that’s where last phase of the project comes in.

Phase 3 of the project

Big ticket size investments weren’t happening on the platform due to the limitation of UPI mandate (allowing only investments up to ₹5,000). There was one possible solution to this: E-mandate.

E-mandates using a bank account allows an investment of up to ₹50,000, but the process to set up an E-mandate is lengthy. That’s the reason, why we started with UPI mandate allowing users to setup AutoPay within in the start SIP flow.

Adding E-mandate to the app after releasing UPI mandate was a little challenging and demanded some serious change in the flows.

Earlier, we were creating the user AutoPay on first instalment itself as UPI mandate token authorization allows that, making it zero-effort for the user. Now, if user chooses to setup SIP of more than ₹5,000, then we ask the user to setup the AutoPay right after first instalment.

But, that’s not it. What if a user with SIP of amount ₹4000 wants to update the SIP amount to ₹10,000? For this, here’s an updated Edit SIP flow:

Impact

Within 6 months of launch, wise generated an AUM of more than 11 crores.

After 2 months of launch, AUM of Wise was more than 2.5X compared to the AUM of digital gold and mutual month for those 2 months

30% of existing spenny users, switch their automatic roundup investments to Wise.

Thanks for dropping by

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Crafted with text, images and a hell lot of procrastination using Figma and Framer