The challenge and the team
Maintaining and maximising the potential of multiple, separate business offerings was one the biggest challenges the Equals Group faced. By existing in silos, the likes of international payments, expense management and faster payments were tailored to specific audiences rather than being a solution for larger corporations with broader money management issues.
The new strategy was to centralise the B2B offerings into a single business solution - the Equals Money account. The goal was to improve customer experience, remove barriers to cross-selling services, and increase the value of the business.
As Head of Product Design my role was to manage the design process and the four designers that were part of the project. We also had three product squads and five product owners working with a timeline of 20 months, overseen by our CPO who was the key stakeholder.
Requirements for the new solution
- Single business solution
- A multi-currency offering
- Expense cards for individual and shared use
- Accountancy integration
- Annotation capability
- Real-time balance overview
- International payments function
The research phase
As a team, we ensured that our homework was done before any work started, so by the time we kicked off there was already a lot of thinking behind what we were doing. This meant that we all held deep knowledge of the jobs to be done, problems that needed solving and what we wanted to bring over to the new platform.
We did a benchmarking exercise to understand how competitors present their solutions and identify gaps in the market that we could occupy. Alongside this, we carried out an audit of the existing products by holding interviews with account managers and the customer services team to understand the biggest customer pain points and identify opportunities.
This initial process was invaluable to the project as a whole and helped us build a blueprint for what the product needed to be. It meant we had data and insights to answer the ‘why’ behind our decision-making process and it aligned everyone on the strategy.
New principles
It became clear early on that nailing the principles and making them crystal clear was critical to the success of the project due to the scale and complexities of developing a multi-layered, multi-currency offering. We had to break down balances at a business, currency, department and individual card-level, ensuring they all worked together seamlessly.
We carried out several exercises to map out the architecture which helped develop a smart logic that would work for our wide range of customer types (small-scale SMBs to global corporations). This logic also helped the back-end team start to define the project from an engineering perspective.
The blueprints we had built enabled us to have a clear vision and break down tasks to see how much design resource was going to be needed for each phase. Managing the design process, this meant I was able to scope clear MVP timelines for the stakeholders. At the time we were only working with two designers but thanks to blueprints, I was able to bring in another two which was crucial to the delivery of the project.
Setting strong foundations
Something we learned as a team at Equals was how to use design systems to our advantage. One of the key aspects in coordinating such a big project while moving at speed was to have the system in place before starting any UX flows or mock ups. This may seem contradictory to some as we were almost bringing in UI ahead of UX, but by using Figma and design libraries it allowed us to make large-scale changes without sacrificing quality or efficiency.
We then took our blueprints and mocked up on high-fidelity with our existing libraries. This was also the time when we defined our dark and light mode palettes. Once we were happy with everything, the last step was an accessibility check. With some final adjustments, the foundation was set and we were ready to start building the groundwork.
The build begins
As I mentioned earlier, the multi-currency and balances were two complex elements of the offering that would define the end product. With that in mind, that’s where we decided to kick things off. Over the course of 4 weeks, I led workshops with the design team, product owners and lead developers to create a high-fidelity set of flows that would cover each requirement for these features.
Once we had the set of flows we ran tests and interviews, using moderate testing with our customers which helped us address high-value points of feedback for specific use cases. On the other hand, the unmoderated tests were useful in addressing changes on a smaller scale, focusing on smaller interactions within the user journey.
Some of the feedback we received around language and copy was shared with a parallel project team that was developing our branding at the time, looking at ‘What we call things’. This was an important point of focus for me - learnings from one project should not be isolated from the rest of the business, over-communication is vital.
After we had all of the results back, we made the necessary adjustments and sign-offs with the CTO and started to produce our PROD document. This was where we defined all possible instances for each component and flow as well as breaking points and other details that were needed for development.
Where are we now?
Today, after nearly two years developing the Equals Money account, the first wave of customers are using the product successfully and we are close to migrating the majority of remaining customers over. Despite it still being a new product, we are already seeing growing interest from the European and North American market.
One of the biggest areas of impact so far has been on the stock market with H1 revenues up 84% from 2021. This has helped the company recover from what has been a difficult 3 years across the financial market, and generated a positive forecast for the next few years as well.
