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The Value of Banking within a Financial Software Suite 

This is a discovery research project I conducted for Wave Financial. At this time, Wave’s business bank account was available by invite only, and we had begun inviting new users of Wave to join our bank (previously, we had only invited long-standing users of Wave to join). After a couple initial rounds of invites to these new users, our Product Marketing Manager reached out to me to conduct research around the value proposition of our bank account to users who may not be familiar with the rest of our products.

Background and Goals

Our product marketing manager and the rest of the banking product team needed to understand how new-to-Wave users differed from veteran Wave users in terms of how they viewed the value of an integrated business bank account. We knew that current bank account users valued the integration with Wave and the no fees offering, and we wanted to validate if this was also true for new-to-Wave users.

Strategic Goals:

The objective of this research was to increase the acquisition rate of our business bank account by:

  • Understanding the value proposition of Wave Money to net new-to-Wave user

  • Understanding the types of net new-to-Wave businesses who sign up for Wave Money, in order to campaign towards these types of businesses in the future

Method

In order to understand the value of Wave banking to new-to-Wave users, we decided to focus on the new users who had chosen to sign up for our bank account. This research was all about understanding how users feel, and what motivated them to do a certain action (in this case, sign up for Wave’s business bank account), so we decided to conduct interviews in order to draw out their needs and motivations.

Once the interviews were conducted, I worked with the UX designers, product manager and product marketing manager to synthesize our findings into a few important insights.

Crucial Insights

While there was overlap in the value that new-to-Wave users and veteran Wave users saw in our bank offering, new-to-Wave users had some important differences in what they believed was valuable.

 

Both groups of users found the no fees aspect to be important, as well as the integration with the rest of the Wave ecosystem in order to make bookkeeping easier. However, new-to-Wave users also felt that these aspects were valuable:

  • New users valued the importance of separating personal and business bank accounts in order to appear more professional, for legal reasons, and to help at tax time.

  • New users wanted to feel like they could trust the institution they put their money into, and since they did not already have established trust with Wave, they needed more reassurance during the signup process that we were a trustworthy choice.

  • New users mentioned that the ease of signup made them more inclined to completely onboard into banking, and once they were in the product they continued to use it because they liked the features.

For additional findings and learnings, please contact juliepmtoth@gmail.com.

Research Impact

Product Impact:

  • The marketing team created a segmented marketing campaign based on the findings from this research, and the new messaging was successful in increasing the login rate of Wave banking by ~23%

Strategic Impact:

  • The insights from this research were an important component for the creation of the strategic roadmap for Q4 2022

Stakeholder Collaboration Impact:

  • This research was the launchpad for a much bigger research project looking into the banking needs of Wave’s target users as a whole (end date: July 2022)

My Learnings

  • Sometimes a project can start out with a specific goal for a specific person, but turn into a larger, broader use project that can help many teams

  • Good research often leads to more questions and more research

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