Kola Ojo.
Revamping the lending experience for 4M+ Nigerians
FairMoney MFB
Leading digital bank in emerging markets, offering Tier 1 financial services to consumers and merchants.
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Headquarters
Paris, France
Engagement period
Aug 2021 - Mar 2022
Role
Product designer, Lending Nigeria
Collaborators
Mudit Sharma, Nkem Oyaghire, Elina Rasmane, Meredith Peng, Rémi Ollivier, Rotimi Bakare
Contributions
UX Research, Data Analysis, UI design, Prototyping, Usability testing, Design system
FairMoney is a credit-led digital bank building for emerging markets, with a strong presence in Nigeria and India, and over 6 million registered users.
I joined the Lending Nigeria team when the company was about transitioning from purely an online lender to becoming a full-fledged neo bank. In this capacity, I was responsible for all design efforts made on the Nigerian lending funnel, the product’s core offering.
Highlighted Goal
The product was already being used. And the business was already doing amazing numbers. The goal now was to revamp the lending funnel to be more streamlined, transparent, and in line with the brand refresh being done.
As we were also trying to introduce our customer base to our banking services, the secondary goal was to identify opportunities within the lending flow to nudge users towards using banking features.
We needed to audit the entire lending funnel before we could overhaul. The first step was to put all the various screens and states into a single user flow so everyone on the team could see what the customer’s journey currently looked like from end to end.
I then worked with product designer, Rotimi Bakare, to audit the entire funnel and highlight points that could be improved, based off app analytics. We presented this to the larger product organisation and worked with product managers to prioritise the fixes.
The goals of the revamp were clear:
The loan application process was unnecessarily bloated. After discussing with members of the Risk team to understand exactly what data points were necessary to successfully score a prospective lender, it was clear a lot of fields could be shaved off the application flow.
I worked on a revised loan application flow that I ran by the Design Lead and the PM in charge of Loan application.
Redesign areas in the lending funnel that were contributing to user churn to be more streamlined.
Simplify the way we were displaying loan offers and think of new ways to recommend higher ticket loans to users.
Participants were more likely to remember their max amount when it was a permanent component of the offer screen.
90% of participants shown a vertical layout were able to adequately explain their loan terms, as opposed to only 58% of people shown the current horizontal layout.
Participants testing the dropdown variant recorded the highest rate of completion, followed by selection boxes, and finally, sliders.
Over 60% of participants were declining offers in a bid to adjust their loan terms.
Identify opportunities to nudge users towards our new banking features.
Auditing the Lending funnel
Loan Application
Loan Offer
Some other projects I worked on with the FairMoney team include:
Other FairMoney projects
PREV.
Advancly
NEXT.
Inspire Africa
Revised loan application
Relevant personal information of users would be pulled from their Bank Verification Number (BVN) and other information would only be required depending on the amount of money being requested for and the nature of the applicant's work.
App analytics was showing that 8% of the total first time lenders were dropping off at the loan offer screen, so this was one of the big priorities of the redesign.
After reviewing similar products like Monzo, Revolut, Branch, Carborn and Opay, the next step was blocking out wireframes. 21 concepts were developed, I then worked with the design lead to scale them down to based on perceived usability & scalability.
Major insights from the usability tests were:
Previous loan application screens
Previous loan offer screens
Concept 1:
Dropdowns
Concept 3:
Sliders
Concept 2:
Selection boxes
Testing, testing
3 concepts were moved to usability testing. I collaborated with an internal UX researcher, Nkem Oyaghire, to plan and run 18 moderated test sessions, and then ran unmoderated tests via Useberry with 2,018 users.
The purpose of the test was to:
1. To understand how users would interact with the various UI components.
2. To determine if the decline button was churning prospective lenders and if we could improve conversion by redesigning it.
3. To determine how best to lay out loan offers & terms.
The redesign
In the redesign, I substituted the horizontal layout for a vertical one to keep the loan terms simple. Adding percentages next to the months and showing a payment breakdown once a tenor is selected also helps further simplify our offer terms.
To nudge users towards higher loans, I made the max amount a permanent thing on the loan page and started showing loan offers from highest to lowest.
In the redesign, banking nudges were added to the end of the funnels, both for when the loan is approved and when loans are declined.
For users whose loan requests were declined, using FairMoney banking services would help increase their credit score.
The revamped loan funnel started being released to production in January 2022. Since then, FairMoney has become a house-hold name among online banks within the country. Some major takeaways from this project were:
Working with a global remote team
Over 9 months I worked within the Lending Nigeria team, distributed over Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. The importance of clear communication, cultural awareness, adaptability was deeply re-emphasised.
Designing with data
With a user base of over 6 million users and 10,000 loan being disbursed each day, we couldn’t leave anything to chance. Every change to the app could have very important impact, and so every idea was rigorously tested with large sample sizes. Monitoring product analytics to identify improvement opportunities was also a daily part of my work.
Result & Learnings
4%
Churn rate on the loan offer screen dropped from 8% to 4% in the month of its release.
10,000
Average amount of FairMoney loans being disbursed each day in Nigeria.
#4
4th highest rated app in Nigerian Finance sector on Google PlayStore.
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Revamping adjacent loan features like Loan Top-ups, Loan Extensions, and Early repayment rewards.
Designed and built the website to launch the company’s business lending vertical ⎯ recording over 5,000 applications and N200 million disbursed in 5 months.
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