Neo Money is a FinTech startup who's mission is centered around helping Thai people achieve their financial life goals. The company aims to become a next-gen digital bank that curates holistic solutions that encompasses all aspects of financial wellbeing (i.e debt management, credit score, investing, etc.)
Debt is a serious problem for a majority of Thai people, especially those new to the workforce and approaching retirement. In fact, in 2018 Thailand ranked 11th-highest in the world for household debt and according to the Thai National Credit Bureau about 3 million or 14% of all Thai people with existing debt are more than 90 days behind on their debt repayment. Of this group, people aged 25-35 were the most concerning with as much as 20% of the group with unpaid loans of longer than 90 days.
NEO Money approached our team to help them better understand who their customers were and design a digital refinancing experience that would better help their customers on their journey to pay off their debt.
Easy to understand, easy to visualize
NEO pre-calculation feature helps people considering consolidating their debts with NEO better visualize how their new monthly payments and total interest compared to their existing loans.
Fast approval times, from weeks to days
Applying for refinancing was mostly done physically at the branches and was a long a laborious process, often taking about a week to hear back. The NEO app allowed people to conveniently apply entirely through their smartphones and hear back within 2 days.
A community of learners
A home for anyone interested in learning more about how to build better financial habits. People can take an online course on debt management with a well known financial coach or read curated content that includes motivating stories from everyday people who have just succeeded in paying off their debt.
Automating a desired habit
NEO encourages its customers to set up automated payments to help keep them on track to pay down their debt. People can easily link their bank account and use the direct debit feature to make payments to NEO automatically.
Incentivized savings
NEO helps you start building up your savings fund today. When people refinance with NEO they receive a 1.3% cashback on their total loan amount. Every time people pay their NEO bill on time they also collect a portion of that cashback, which will be paid to the user when the loan is paid off.
Easy to understand, easy to visualize
NEO pre-calculation feature helps people considering consolidating their debts with NEO better visualize how their new monthly payments and total interest compared to their existing loans.
Fast approval times, from weeks to days
Applying for refinancing was mostly done physically at the branches and was a long a laborious process, often taking about a week to hear back. The NEO app allowed people to conveniently apply entirely through their smartphones and hear back within 2 days.
A community of learners
A home for anyone interested in learning more about how to build better financial habits. People can take an online course on debt management with a well known financial coach or read curated content that includes motivating stories from everyday people who have just succeeded in paying off their debt.
Automating a desired habit
NEO encourages its customers to set up automated payments to help keep them on track to pay down their debt. People can easily link their bank account and use the direct debit feature to make payments to NEO automatically.
Incentivized savings
NEO helps you start building up your savings fund today. When people refinance with NEO they receive a 1.3% cashback on their total loan amount. Every time people pay their NEO bill on time they also collect a portion of that cashback, which will be paid to the user when the loan is paid off.
To get a better understanding of who it was we would be designing for and what their pains and goals were, we began with a one-on-one interview with five people who had at least two outstanding loans that they were currently paying the minimum amounts on.
User Criteria:
• Age 23 to 45
• Salary of 30,000THB
• Use banking and e-commerce apps
• Have at least 2 outstanding loans
• Currently paying the minimum amount
Below are some of the insights I found particularly interesting about the journey and behaviors of the people we spoke with:
When zero percent isn’t really free. Based on our interviews, 0% installment loans were a major culprit behind people's high levels of debt. In Thailand, these 6-24 month easy installments loans at 0% interest are often offered for big ticket electronic items, household furniture, and most recently flights and hotels. In one instance, we spoke to someone who's installment payments pushed his family expenses to exceed their income even before food, utilities, and other necessary purchases were accounted for. As a result the family had to use their credit card instead, which do carry a 18% annual interest. So, although their big ticket items were 0% they ended up paying interest on the items they had to buy with their credit card.
When considering to purchase a product on credit many people didn't think in terms of interest rates or total payments, but rather what the minimum payment was they had to pay to buy it. Because of this a lot of people struggling to pay back their debt turned to cash cards. A cash card is similar to a credit card except it can be used only at the ATM, however, it has a much higher annual interest rate of 28% compared 18% of credit cards. What made the cash cards appealing is that it has a minimum payment of 5% of the outstanding loan compared to credit card’s 10%.
Another problem people faced was not knowing where they should even begin. To them, the problem seems so insurmountable that many accepted the fact that they would always have to live with debt.
Embarrassed to share their financial situation with friends and family, many people with debt problems didn't know who to turn to for financial advice. Some people we spoke to asked for help in discussion boards and forums and some even confided with the tellers at the bank to ask for financial advice.
Many of them were frustrated with the ambiguous process of applying for refinancing at traditional banks. They felt that the criteria for who gets a loan was vague and the information on exactly how much they had to pay was difficult to understand.
Many people who had refinanced relapse back into debt because they didn't change their spending habits. For example, one Sales agent told us that refinancing inadvertently allowed them to increase how much minimum monthly payments they could now afford since when one bank pays off the loan of another, the customer wasn't required to close that account so they could still use that bank's credit card.
Based on our interviews, we came up with two personas: Khun Ble and Khun Care (Khun in Thai is similar to Mr. or Mrs. but is more general and not gender specific). The cute storyboard illustrations below were drawn by my colleague Apisit (if I were to draw it would sadly be stick figures only).
Ble is an account executive who enjoys staying ahead of the latest fashion and tech trends. He uses his credit card for most of his purchases and doesn't pay much attention to the outstanding balance because he always chooses to pay the minimum anyways. Because of his high monthly debt payments that exceeds his monthly income, he feels suffocated by his debt but don't know what to do. He has heard of refinancing and is considering consolidating his debt to lower his monthly payment installment to give him more breathing room.
Care is a new mother who is having a difficult time managing her finances. Some months her family spends more than they actually earn, having to resort to credit cards. Care is starting to worry that if her husband and her don't change their habits and start taking action now it could hurt their child's future. Although Care doesn't have to a strong need to refinance, she has been seeking advice online to find a way to manage her debt before it spirals out of control.
From our interview it became clear that if we wanted to help people like Care and Ble who are struggling to pay off debt we needed to provide more value than just refinancing but also help guide them in the right direction. With this in mind, our problem statement became:
How might we not only make the refinancing process more seamless and transparent to people in debt trouble but also empower them to begin to take the first steps towards their financial goals?
Our team started by unpacking the process of applying for refinancing since this would serve as the core journey of the NEO app experience. We also explored a variety of ideas on how best to help Khun Care improve her financial wellbeing. Of these ideas, a mission-based learning module and a debt calculator seemed like it would resonate best with Khun Care and help her take the first steps towards her financial wellbeing.
Shown below are some of the early wireframe screens. The app has 4 main bottom navigation tabs: home, service, learn, and tools. The home tab consist of a CTA to apply for refinancing, trending articles, success stories highlights, and a banner section promoting the Money Coach Academy. The services tab is where the refinancing product is located but will also house NEO's future product pipeline such as credit score checks and credit card management.
The Money Coach Academy is a short video series in the Learn tab to help people jump start their journey of getting out of debt. Based on insights from our user interview, NEO had been exploring a partnership with Khun Numm The Money Coach (think Thai version of Dave Ramsey) and wanted to see how receptive actual users were to the idea.
When customers click apply for refinancing they go through the process of inputing their income and the details of the debt they have. If the customers' debt exceeds the amount they are eligible to refinance they select which debt they would like to consolidate. After this step the user begins the application process which is made up of 5 steps. These steps are inputing personal detail, uploading documentation, select loan terms, e-KYC (verifying identity), and await approval.
Next, we conducted a user test on our wireframe prototype with 5 more people following the same recruiting criteria as before (View Figma Prototype). The goal of this user test was to:
These were some of the key findings:
Money Coach Academy was a hit or miss
Of the 5 people we interviewed the 2 that knew Coach Numm were very excited by the online crash course. However, the other 3 people who didn't know him just swiped pass without any discussion. Interestingly though, all the people we spoke with found the success stories intriguing and wanted to click to read more.
Having a Partner Bank was very important
Since users never heard of NEO Money before they were skeptical of applying for refinancing from an app. This was especially apparent when we had purposely didn't mention the name of any banks since at that time NEO hadn’t finalize which bank they would be partnering with.
Misinterpretation of additional fees
Many people were confused by what the additional fees were (the 5,000 baht on the top with the more detail arrow). At first, we had included these fees so people would be aware that when they close their personal loan account they had to pay an early termination fee to their bank. However, it made the users more confused because they thought it was the fee NEO was charging them.
Confusing step interaction
We had initially designed this wireframe screen with the intention of allowing the users to see what all the steps were and the documents and material they needed to prepare. However, it became quite clear from the user test that it signified to the user that they didn’t have to complete the steps sequentially. Another drawback was that it made the steps appear very long and quite a few mentioned that it is pretty long.
Reluctance to share back of ID code
Many of the people we spoke with were not okay with having to take a photo of the back of their Thai ID card (it has a special code on it). Even when taking a photo of the front of their ID, a few people mentioned that they would feel more comfortable if there was a watermark on it for peace of mind.
Money Coach Academy was a hit or miss
Of the 5 people we interviewed the 2 that knew Coach Numm were very excited by the online crash course. However, the other 3 people who didn't know him just swiped pass without any discussion. Interestingly though, all the people we spoke with found the success stories intriguing and wanted to click to read more.
Having a Partner Bank was very important
Since users never heard of NEO Money before they were skeptical of applying for refinancing from an app. This was especially apparent when we had purposely didn't mention the name of any banks since at that time NEO hadn’t finalize which bank they would be partnering with.
Misinterpretation of additional fees
Many people were confused by what the additional fees were (the 5,000 baht on the top with the more detail arrow). At first, we had included these fees so people would be aware that when they close their personal loan account they had to pay an early termination fee to their bank. However, it made the users more confused because they thought it was the fee NEO was charging them.
Confusing step interaction
We had initially designed this wireframe screen with the intention of allowing the users to see what all the steps were and the documents and material they needed to prepare. However, it became quite clear from the user test that it signified to the user that they didn’t have to complete the steps sequentially. Another drawback was that it made the steps appear very long and quite a few mentioned that it is pretty long.
Reluctance to share back of ID code
Many of the people we spoke with were not okay with having to take a photo of the back of their Thai ID card (it has a special code on it). Even when taking a photo of the front of their ID, a few people mentioned that they would feel more comfortable if there was a watermark on it for peace of mind.
Since this was a brand new product, our team worked extensively with the NEO team to lay out what the look and feel of the app would be. Shown below were some of the attributes we brainstormed as we explored what the company wanted people to associate with their brand. In the end, the attributes that we felt best described NEO Money were credible, caring, and coaching. We believed that this was in alignment with the company's vision and people-first value to step beyond the bounds of a ‘bank’ to empower people through their life journey.
Drawing on NEO's aim to bring a new interpretation to the customer-bank relationships by providing long-term individualized care, we created a mood board that best captured these emotions. In order to convey these feeling it was clear that our illustrations would be key in highlighting these human to human connections. However, because this was a financial app with lots of text and data, we wanted the UI be clean and minimal with lots of white space but still have some playfulness. This meant that we didn't want our characters to be too minimal that it was devoid of emotion, so for our people illustration it was important to have enough detail in the foreground to give them life but a subtle background as to not detract from the content. As for our icons we wanted them to be simple with flat colors.
Based on our mood board we experimented with a few variations for the app's UI theme. In the first version, we used NEO's magenta as the primary color. Although the app did look clean and bold, we felt that it lacked personality and appeared generic. We also ran into a small problem while designing a popup screen that had a delete confirmation. We noticed that the magenta primary button looked very similar to the red "Confirm to delete" button and became worried that users might become accustomed to the magenta CTA and accidentally click the wrong button.
In the second version, we explored using blue as our primary color with tinges of magenta, green, and yellow to make the app more lively. It was important to still keep the UI clean for easy reading so these colors were added to the illustrations and icons. Thankfully our colleague Apisit had some free time to help us draw new illustrations, so we didn't have to rely on stock images as placeholders anymore. Although we did like the design direction this was going, NEO was concerned that the overall look of the app now seemed predominantly blue.
In the third version, we returned to using NEO's magenta as the primary. The founder of NEO had used a bright red primary button in their prior startup's app and was looking to do something similar again here. In addition, we made some changes to our illustration style. In the previous version we used mostly flat colors and a linear gradient for the background, but for this new version we added gradients to the base object to give it more depth. We ended up also decreasing the amount of blue and increasing the amount of magenta in our illustration such as with the splash screen and home dashboard card. After applying this new theme to other screens we found that the flat button on our cards competed for attention with many of the elements on the screen, so we also added in some light shadow to our primary CTA buttons.
Collaborating on the UI designs with the amazing designers on my team, we ended up delivering around 80 screens for the entire NEO Money App. Below are some of the output of that teamwork. If you are interested in seeing more of the app you can view Figma UI prototype in more detail here as well.
Some of the lessons I learnt and observations I made along the way
Many people I interviewed mentioned the negative psychological effect of debt on their mental health and found it fulfilling to work on a project that had the potential to help the people I sat down to talk with. Although for this phase we delivered primarily a refinancing app, we have been exploring ideas with NEO Money on how to provide actionable advice and coaching in the next phases of the product.
I always make it a habit to read a book about the topic I am designing for. This time, I read the book Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey and found his story not only inspirational but his advice really practical, especially his concept of a zero-based budget to tell every dollar where to go.
When I first started out at Ahancer I wasn't able to help much with the actual design beyond creating wireframes. However, for this project I felt like I was actually able to contribute more to the team when it came to visual design and had a lot of fun in working on the UI theme and taking my designs all the way from wireframes to high-fidelity UI. Below are some of the UI screens I designed mostly by myself with feedback from Noon and Natt on how to improve it.
Some of my illustrations were even used in our final design screen (right now I can do only images with geometric shapes unlike my colleagues Apisit and Noon whose human characters are so beautiful).
