Wealthsimple ProdCon 2021

ProdCon is an annual hackathon hosted by the UW PM club that focuses on Product Management. Last year's event was a 1-day hackathon in partnership with Wealthsimple that my friends and I decided to participate in! Although we were a group of designers, tackling a problem from a PM perspective was a fun challenge. Best of all, we also ended up winning first place out of over twenty teams 🥳

Images from Wealthsimple

Wealthsimple is an innovative financial company that offers various tech products to help users easily manage their finances such as stocks or cryptocurrency. In January 2020, they launched their Wealthsimple Cash app which allows users to send and receive money through their mobile app. They also began various promotions in Canadian Universities to gain exposure in the student community such as offering food deals or club discounts.

After talking with a few students about their experiences so far, we found that many have downloaded the app to access the promotions that are currently being offered at local businesses. However, this is often the extent to which users interact with the application and continue using e-transfer afterwards.

To find growth opportunities to focus on in the hackathon, we decided to quickly analyze our current competitors. This helped us discover what Wealthsimple Cash was doing well and what needed help.

Our key takeaway was that although Wealthsimple Cash wasn’t lacking features compared to its main competitor (Interac e-transfer), Canadian young adults were already too comfortable with their current methods and don’t feel motivated enough to switch to something new. We also noted that a key feature Cash was lacking was the ability to split bills between friends. From our student perspective and experience using e-transfer, this was a major growth opportunity that we saw the potential to thrive in and led us to our project goal:

For our plan of action, we decided on these two focuses that we wanted to design.

🏆 Primary Focus

The first focus area is to leverage push notifications to prompt users at moments when they would usually go for traditional payment methods.

As mentioned in our competitive analysis, current users don’t feel incentivized to switch from payment methods they are familiar with. We want to identify those moments and provide users with incentives to encourage the first purchase with Wealthsimple Cash at the stores. The goal is to embed this new payment method into the user’s existing routine and build habits to increase engagement long term.

🥈 Secondary Focus

Our secondary focus is to design the bill-splitting feature to be faster and easier to use than e-transfer. This will encourage users to continue using Wealthsimple long-term as it’s more efficient and user-friendly.

Push notifications to grab the user's attention

Our solution starts with using location services to time the perfect push notifications while you are out with friends. Imagine you and a group of friends are getting together for dinner, Wealthsimple would recognize that multiple users with mutual contacts are together and send a 10% coupon to encourage them to pay using our app. Learning from previous Wealthsimple promotions in Waterloo, students and young professionals love getting a good deal.

Flow #1: For sending to one contact nearby

Once they are in the app, the first flow we thought of was for requesting/sending to a singular contact nearby. If other contacts are nearby, a bubble with their handle will appear on the home screen (privacy settings can be adjusted to suit the user’s comfort levels). When a user clicks on someone, they are able to request or send money to that user. Previous transfers are also shown for quick reference if available. The rest of the flow then follows the existing pattern for familiarity.

Flow #2: For sending to multiple contacts nearby

The second use case was for requesting/sending to multiple contacts nearby. It follows a similar flow but begins with long holding the first group member to begin multi-selecting. Users can also adjust how they want to divide the bill to suit different situations better.

Being able to join ProdCon was such a great learning experience and push to try something new. We were quite intimidated to join a technical PM competition as a group of designers but I think our focus to solve for our users gave us an advantage!

We also recently used the Wealthsimple Cash app again and noticed a bill-splitting feature was added 🤔 (*gasp* could it have been inspired by us??)

Potential next steps if there was more time:

Continue fleshing out the flows to include all edge cases and uses

Iterate on different design ideas (due to time constraints, we didn't get to explore too much)

Conduct some user tests to ensure our solution was easy to use