Settl is a digital financial platform that affords individuals the luxury of financial transactions from the comfort of their digital devices. With Settl, you can send, request and receive money, perform online and offline transactions with virtual and physical debit cards, & pay your bills.

Visiting traditional banks can be quite a hassle, from the never ending queues to cranky customer experience officers and cashiers whose crankiness is fatigue induced to impatient customers like you and I. 👀👀 You would agree with me that visiting a bank is more of a chore than it is a fun activity.

However, that should not be the case.

Moving money in and out of your accounts, sending money to others and paying bills which are essentially the basic reasons an average person needs a bank should not be so stressful.

Let me take you on a journey for a few seconds.

Imagine that you could walk into a virtual banking hall where you are the only customer. The decor and ambience is great, it’s a hundred percent self service but there are prompts every step of the way to guide you and ensure that you are not stuck or unsure of what to do at any point.

Not only are you able to complete all your financial transactions in record time, you also have the best customer experience ever.

Was that too good to be true? 💀

With Settl, the image I just painted can be the reality of every single user - Financial transactions without the hassles of traditional banking.

On this project, I am privileged to be the lead designer on the project, hence I had the responsibility to visualize the solution and bring it to life.

The design process involved a lot of secondary research (due to the time constraint) and it had me poring over multiple financial technology solutions. As I did so, I questioned the design thinking processes and decisions, drew inspiration from a number of them and most especially noted design flaws I could not afford to repeat.

I really wanted to make out time to hear first-hand from potential users even though I was really pressed for time. This required me to prioritize and take time out of my own free time to speak to a couple of people, to understand their habits, their current challenges / pain points they face, and how they see the app making a difference in optimizing pain areas.

My experience as a user of numerous financial apps also came in handy hence, I made it a point of duty that my designs were user centric and intuitive enough for even the most technologically unsavvy.

From the research conducted (user interviews & survey), we could draw some insights and come up with some common research themes and they were as follows:

Long queues at banks to perform basic transactions like sending money & paying bills

Low interest rates on savings

Wide range of fees on transactions carried out

Poor customer service

Long wait time to get debit cards for offline and online transactions

We were able to come up with some key elements to guide us while crafting our product requirements and user stories for this product. After a deep dive into the research themes, here are some key solution elements we came up with:

Sending money easily and at no charge

Creating flexible wallets for savings with great interest rates and other causes.

Swift and efficient customer support

Using virtual and physical debit cards for day to day transactions

We understand how important it is for users to get quality customer support and we made sure there were adequate support channels to help customers solve any issues they may encounter. We curated a detailed helpcenter cutting across all aspects of the product. We made available a live chat on the app itself, for users to contact support directly if they encountered any problems they couldn’t fix using the helpcenter. We also put in place other support channels, like a support email address, a contact phone number and social media channels.

This project is in it’s prelaunch state and I am elated at the possibilities it will present to the bouyant Nigerian market and in turn the business. However, there are certain business impacts we’ve already been able to achieve on this project: Raising money from key investors to help push the project forward: Prior to the launch of the product, we have been able to catch the eye of certain investors and we’ve raised an undisclosed sum of money, to strengthen our operations, marketing and engineering efforts to be able to propel the project forward.

Settl.me became a stand-alone company: I have been privileged to work on several products in my current place of work (The Bulb Africa) and these products remain under The Bulb Africa. For Settl, the product was deemed very profitable and good for business and it was carved out as a company on it’s own. I’m particularly excited about this feat and I’m happy to have been part of the team that worked on this project. Hiring efforts have started for different roles within this company (Settl), and it’s really exciting to see.

The birth of other profitable ventures within the new company: After spending time working on this project, we were able to identify other possible ventures we could explore for the company. We have started explorations for the new product directions and so far it’s looking up!