Yolt

Introduction

Yolt is (or was) a FinTech startup. They focused on Personal Finance Management for consumers with the Yolt app. For businesses they offered an Open Banking Platform mainly to financial institutions but also other businesses. Businesses could use the power of Yolt's Open Banking Platform to execute direct payments with Payment Initiation Services (PIS) and retrieve account information with Account Information Services (AIS) to analyse a potential lender's probability of default for example.

My role

I was hired as Design Manager and the intention was that I would coach the team (designers in both the product team and the marketing team) and work side by side with the Head of Product and the Head of Marketing on our product proposition for Yolt.

Although the Yolt app had lots of positive reviews and was lauded overall, the revenue and user retention stayed behind. The most pressing goal was therefore to improve / change the current propostion to a more successful one.

However, a change of course at our only sponsor ING threw a spanner in the works. They decided to focus more on cost reduction, which unfortunately meant that the Yolt app would be decommissioned.

I was therefore asked (a few months after I joined) to move to the B2B team instead, as this part of Yolt would continue to exist. Here I would work on new Open Banking propositions, and maturing two products: Cashflow Analyser and the Yolt Developer Portal.

However, a change of course at our only sponsor ING threw a spanner in the works. They decided to focus more on cost reduction, which unfortunately meant that the Yolt app would be decommissioned.

Proposition / Strategy work

Yolt's B2B proposition also needed a major refresh, if we wanted to be able to take on the pretty strong competition such as Tink and Truelayer. Up until now, the focus was mostly on delivering API connections for PiS and AIS, and customers needed a lot of technical support to get it all up and running.

In order to move to a more product-centric / customer-centric approach rather than a technology-centric approach, we (myself and the product team) started to map out customer journeys, based on customer input and market insights. We also did a quick competitor analysis and mapped out all the important payments methods (direct debits, credit cards and so on) to get an idea of their strengths and weaknesses.

As time was of the essence, the work doen was fairly quick and dirty, but it gave us a first rough direction on what to focus on (and what not). I used the opportunities that we identified as input for a set of concepts to use in a strategy deck.

High level product design / delivery process.

Customer Journey Mapping out Pains & Gains .

Product Design work

Besides working on the strategy and trying to come up with new propositions for Yolt, I also worked with two scrum teams on two products: Cashflow Analyser and the Yolt Developer Portal.

Cashflow Analyser

Cashflow Analyser is a tool for lenders to quickly determine a potential borrower's financial health and probability of default. Rather than depending on the traditional way of only using external financial data it uses the advantages of Open Banking to analyse a customer’s financial data. By using Account Information Services, all bank accounts of a borrower can be analysed directly.

Cashflow Analyser Dashboard.

After the borrower has approved the temporary access to their bank account(s), Cashflow Analyser presents a set of metrics that will assist the lender in making an informed decision.

Cashflow Analyser Main Flow.

To get an understanding of the needs of our targeting audience, we (myself and product development) talked to a bunch of potential clients (lenders and lease companies) and had a couple of brainstorm / whiteboard sessions to sketch out where we wanted to go. Thanks to our customers we had a good idea what should be in the first version, what the key metrics needed to be.

Together with the development team we iterated on a first version, to get this out to a selected set of customers so that they could test it and provide us with feedback.

Yolt Developer Portal

The Yolt Developer Portal was the entry point for our customers that wanted to set up Open Banking features (such as PiS or AIS) for their products. However, the first iteration of the portal was very much a developer-lead initiative. Which was okay for the time, as having something that works is better than nothing. As the customer base was growing, there was a clear demand for a better designed portal, both in terms of information and user-friendliness.

Yolt Developer Portal Connections Screen.

Working closely with the scrum team I created a new look and feel (with a basic styleguide to go with), a proper navigation structure and a fixed set of responsive templates to give the portal a unified feel in terms of looks and behaviour.

The portal contained a quick wizard to set up new connections for both AIS and PiS services, an API reference with examples, a sandbox mode and a help section.

Karen Groenink