Gakii Gitonga
I&M OTG Business app
On The Go (OTG) Business app is an I&M Bank platform which allows business and corporate customers to transact online.
Objective
Identify functionalities and features to improve the experience of making batch payments on OTG Business app.
In collaboration with the product owner of OTG Business, we identified a gap in the journey of making bulk payments and set out to find which payment types, functionalities and features we can add to the platform to improve customers' experience.
Currently, there are only 3 types of payments which customers can make in batches. These are;
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Mobile Money
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Salaries
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Suppliers
There are other payment types which we felt we could include in order to have a competitive edge in the market.
Initial approach
The initial approach I attempted to use for this project was to study other corporate banking platforms and compare notes.
How?
Identifying participants internally, with access to different online corporate banking platforms.
Obstacle
This approach quickly became a challenge due to the following:
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Requirements needed to open different corporate bank accounts were not readily available
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Limited time
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Caution taken by research participants as they understandably did not want to share data on the different platforms which they have access to
Final approach
Given that the obstacles I faced, I opted to speak to I&M business and corporate customers and discover any pain points which they may have been experiencing as well as find out whether they can offer insights on their experience with other banking platforms.
Research Preparation
Research Method
Since corporate customers were more willing to meet me in person, I decided to conduct a physical interview which would last about 20 minutes.
Research Guide
I also created a research guide, which was a list of questions which guided me through the interviews.
The first few questions were to get a feel of the customers general experience as well as get them comfortable enough to freely express themselves.
The next couple of questions focused on batch payments.
This guide was also reviewed by the product owner in order to be in alignment before the interviews.
Participant Requirements
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Frequent us of OTG Business, at least every week
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Frequent use of batch payments
Participant Requirements
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Frequent us of OTG Business, at least every week
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Frequent use of batch payments
Feedback
There was a lot of feedback which I received from the participants who I interviewed. Some of the feedback has been highlighted below.
1. Inability to initiate bulk payments with insufficient funds available.
Customers are unable to initiate payments on the platform due to insufficient funds. They feel that if they can initiate bulk payments and save them on the platform as they await funds to be credited into their account, it would save them so much time in their daily operations. Platforms like Standard Chartered, allow customers to upload and save payments with the knowledge that funds will be credited to the account within a particular time frame.
2. Limited batch payment type
OTG business only allows for 3 payment types. However, customers expressed the need to make the following payments in batches.
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Tax payments to KRA
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Airtime
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Statutory payments e.g. NSSF & NHIF
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Utility payments
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Credit card top up
3. Inability to initiate and approve payments in one journey
Customers who have both the mandate of 'initiator' and 'approver' would like to initiate and approve payments in one journey as compared to breaking the journey into two parts and consuming time logging into the platform twice.
4. Inability to negotiate for FX on the platform when especially paying suppliers
Customers have to go call treasury to negotiate a favourable FX rate and they would like to have an easier process where they can negotiate and initiate payment on the platform.
5. High cost of transactions
Customers have expressed that cost of transactions with I&M Bank is high compared to other competitors such as KCB and PesaPal open float.
Next steps