geneqty: neobanking mobile app for women-led businesses
The financial recession of 2008 resulted in closure of more than half the country’s small business loan organizations and small local banks, a number that remains down by 40% from pre-crisis levels. This has severely reduced access to banking services and funding for small-to-medium-sized businesses.
The challenge is multiplied for women-led small businesses, which struggle to gain access to the same funding as their male counterparts, despite representing 58% of all business growth, contributing 46% more revenue, and creating 21% more jobs. Women-led small businesses receive only 16% of conventional loans. Systemic gender bias influences women’s opportunities to obtain funding, while factors like a lack of access to relevant business training and counseling may also affect the volume of female applicants.
Banking executive and entrepreneur Dionne Gumbs believes that “people shouldn’t feel so disempowered by their money. Right now, people don’t feel like the system is for them,” she says. “We need to open the door a bit by changing the way it’s consumed.” To solve this problem and capitalize on a potential five trillion dollar market opportunity, Dionne created GenEQTY, a company focused on providing more equitable distribution of capital to women-led small businesses. Inspired by the rise of the neobank (a branch-less, 100% digital banking platform prioritizing a human-centered experience) and the capabilities of artificial intelligence-enabled technologies, Dionne approached our team to help her realize her vision for GenEQTY.
Solution:
Our team laid the foundation for a brand new, relationship-driven, business banking mobile app that adds features as a business grows. This streamlined digital-first banking service leverages AI to eliminate bias and offer expedited access to financing, business banking accounts, data visualization, and a phenomenal, human-centered customer experience.
client:
GenEQTY
methods:
Stakeholder Interview
Deep Dive Research
Competitive Analysis
User Interviews
Usability Testing
Content Strategy
Prototyping
understanding the opportunity space
what the heck is ‘fintech’?
After interviewing Dionne about her vision for GenEQTY, we needed to familiarize ourselves with the world of financial technologies- an expansive and fast-growing space. We also needed to understand the causes of disparity in funding access for women-led businesses. Our deep dive discovery research covered machine learning and automation, data aggregation, alternative lending, bias in lending, and the neobank model.
Competitive analysis of fifteen similar and adjacent services and applications compared target audience, features, lending models, and ratings, as well as voice and tone. This gave us an awareness of best practices, commonalities among services, and where breaking the mold can be detrimental or effective. An online survey helped us gather insights on pain points and attitudes surrounding small business financing and business banking in general.
Stakeholder Interview: Taking notes and synthesizing as I go.
interviewing users
Next, we interviewed subject matter experts and potential users- women that are CEO’s, financial advisors, and founders of small businesses. We asked them about the processes they went through to secure funding, whether they’ve perceived bias in their business banking, the tools and services they use to manage company finances, and their business banking experience in general.
Affinity Diagramming: Finding patterns and surfacing user priorities discovered during interviews.
user priorities
The users we interviewed had strong emotions tied to business banking, leading to rich insights and clearly exposing the pain points of most small business owners’ experiences. Interviews highlighted three main user priorities: the importance of streamlined access to funding and services, the desire to feel secure and empowered in making financial decisions for their businesses, and the crucial need to develop a relationship with a banker or advisor who knows the nuances of one’s business and understands their values and goals. From these insights, we created our user goal statement to guide development of key features and flows:
“Our users are women-led small businesses that need responsive, approachable digital banking services in order to feel empowered in making financial decisions. We will do this by creating a relation-ship driven mobile banking platform that increases value to the user over time.”
prototype-test-refine
User insights and goal statement in mind, I developed the persona of Sarah, a small craft brewery owner who uses GenEQTY to grow her business. The story of her journey with GenEQTY helped us determine key features. We then produced low-to-medium fidelity prototypes for these features at the beginning, growth, and maturity stages of a small business’ engagement with the app.
We conducted several rounds of user testing and refinement, collecting evaluations of features as well as voice and tone of the content- a crucial part of developing that feeling of a personal banker-client relationship. We then moved the most important features and flows into high fidelity production.
KEY FEATURES
Like other neo-banking apps on the market, GenEQTY provides essential tools, including: account aggregation and data visualization to give users an understanding of their finances at-a-glance; budget setting to help users stay on track and reach their goals; and virtual credit cards to easily manage employee spending.
GenEQTY goes the extra mile by analyzing its users’ data, to make personalized recommendations based on smart predictions. The incorporation of AI eliminates the biases and lengthy application process. By accruing data points over time, GenEQTY can foresee potential needs for funding and automatically offer loans. An advanced AI-enabled chat offers accessible, responsive support and seamlessly transfers users to real people for help on more nuanced issues.
A dashboard that adds features as a business grows, offering aggregate account views, data visualization, and check-ins to help GenEQTY make accurate predictions and offers.
GenEQTY credit card and virtual credit card management; Dark mode; AI-enabled chat support.
presenting the concept
The process culminated in a presentation of our concept to the client. Using our persona Sarah, we showcased our findings and key features as we told the story of her small business journey.
We then delivered a clickable prototype and video walkthrough, annotated wireframes, raw data and research findings, and a content style guide to keep GenEQTY’s voice and tone consistently warm and professional in all contexts, setting Dionne up for success as she shares her GenEQTY vision with investors.
