2021 — 2021Building a bank for Klarna
Klarna decided to build a consumer banking after its success in European market with its buy now and pay later solutions. I was hired as a founding designer and leader to the new product organization. We had the unique opportunity to build a consumer banking from scratch, as well as building the organization with product and engineering leaders.
Key contributions — Leading and executing MVP designs, team building, research
Spending account with basic features for 95% of the daily activities. (+Lots of background work for building the banking foundations and platform)
MVP.
Banking offer with goal based savings (pools) and term-based savings accounts, with improved data visualization for spending breakdown
V2 AND BEYOND.
Main objectives.
Setting a vision and mission for the banking organization
Defining and executing an MVP product
Building a new product organization
Learn our customer’s banking needs and behaviors
Outcome.
100k+
Customers acquired, diversifying wallet categories beyond shopping.
~5%
Set as their primary account in the first 3 months.
Active customers reached by 2022, surpassing significant amount of consumer deposits.
~100k
Increased engagement on other financial products after building a bundled bank offering in 2022.
~20%
10x org growth.
Built design team from 0 to 20+, total organization up to 200+ people.
Approach.
We conducted group study to understand banking behaviors in the German and Swedish markets, along with desk research for banking trends. We saw that money management is emotional and highly personal, and noting the general lack of trust in banking services.
Additionally, 95% of daily banking activities include basic money transfers and real-time transaction updates in Germany.
Our strategy was to create a bank that makes the basics right and build trust from the get go.
Insights shaped our principles. Those shaped our decisions on design details.
The key interactions for daily banking should be only few taps away. Anything else is too much.
Simple is the best.
We aim to find moments to turn the tedious process of bank sign up to an exciting experience.
Make the boring, exciting.
Give clarity and comfort.
Provide as much as feedback by design in the moments of anxiety.
Design Details
✨
Design Details ✨
Bank sign-up as a product upgrade, in less than 5 mins.
We build a modular structure for populating and collecting customer information in banking platform, which allowed us to offer a short sign up process for our existing customers who uses payment solutions. They can review, edit and proceed within couple of taps or continue where they left of.
FINAL DESIGNS BY ANNA H.
Sending money progressing state.
Once the customer confirms their money transfer, sometimes there are delays. To reduce anxiety, we ensure the UI remains responsive and loading happens on the destination page, instead of blocking the UI with a panel, which means we chose to deviate from our mobile framework's standard pattern to serve for this need.
We also introduced real-time balance updates and a celebratory success animation to enhance the user experience during these moments.
FINAL DESIGNS BY HAERIN S.
Validating IBAN number as you type.
We wanted to make IBAN typing as effortless as possible with design moments, validating recipient bank, dynamic character count per country and proper error handling as people type.
FINAL DESIGNS BY DILARA NEUTZE
Post-MVP features.
BUNDLED BANK OFFERING WITH SAVINGS
NEW CATEGORY DESIGNS
GOAL-BASED SAVINGS
Learnings.
Launching took longer than planned, hard to scale systems and the experience. This turned out as an opportunity to grow the scope and hone into design details.
Building a bank is hard.
Team work made it all happen.
Seeing the product evolve as the team grows was extremely rewarding.
Content was more critical than we thought.
This came out consistently in pre and post-development of the products, specially when it comes to building trust and safety.
All the great folks I worked closely on this project.
Felix Würtenberger — Senior Product Director
Dilara Neutze — Director of Product Design
Matias Enghild — Product Lead
Abdellah Ben Hammou — Product Lead
Bjöern Petersen — Analytics Director
Julia Lillehöök — Product Marketing Director
Johan Nilsson — Engineering Manager
Tiina Yu — Product Director
Tracy Yun Tan — Lead Product Designer
Haerin Song — Product Designer
Anna Herasymenko — Product Designer
Alex Ernst — Software Engineer
Paul Arnt — Software Engineer