FinEasy Banking App

Idea to bank the unbanked, Provide them the benefit of digital payments, thereby bring the feeling of inclusion & empowerment in Banking.

Inspiration :

During the COVID19 early stages when most of the Countries had implemented forced Lockdown, we have seen in India how the migrant workers have suffered. We have seen how they have struggled to send money to their family members as not many in the family had Bank accounts. An urge to do something for these migrant workers was the real inspiration behind this idea. Also, below startling facts had pushed us to convert our idea into a working POC concept.

According to 2017, Global Findex Report, World Bank - Total number of adults with no bank account worldwide is 1.7 Billion. Some of the reasons for not maintaining Bank Accounts are:

COST - Cost of maintaining Bank accounts is a barrier cited by 26% percent of adults. In Brazil, Colombia and Peru, almost 60% cited Cost As a Barrier.
DISTANCE - 22% of the adults without an account said that financial institutions are too far away.
DOCUMENTATION - 20% of the adults without an account said that lack of required documents are a reason.

According to GSMA's The State Of Mobile Internet Connectivity Report 2020:

51% of World population is still not using MOBILE internet(Internet enabled phone).

According to Statista.com, Key reasons against adopting digital payments are:

Cash is still the king.
Non-Availability of Point of Sale System.
Instability of Mobile Network
Digital literacy

What it does :

*This solution helps a daily wager earner/single earner of a family, to allocate money to their family members back home for withdrawal or purchases.

Allow them to benefit from the money digitally, without maintaining multiple Bank accounts.
One can financially help his/her old Parents who may not be very good in operating smart phones and allow the benefit of Banking digitalization.
Uses Mobile phone number as the key differentiator.
Key parties to the transaction: Earning family member , CSP (Customer Service Point Representative) appointed by Bank and FinEasy Banking App*.

How we built it :

We spend hours on brainstorming sessions to fine tune our idea to meet the objective.
We prepared the screen layouts, functionality on Papers and then tried to replicate them in Adobe XD as we only had WINDOWS laptops provided by Finastra.
We onboarded an IOS developer for further development.
Reworked on the entire design and created a working Prototype POC via Microsoft PowerApps, where we linked with Twilio to generate OTP and enabled Camera controls to capture Beneficiary photos for validation.

Challenges we ran into

75% of the team is consisting of pure functional consultants. We didn't have an idea how to create a working Prototype POC.
Lack of knowledge on Android/IOS development.
Lack of knowledge on UX/UI designing frameworks.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learned how FFDC Design Thinking tools can be made best use of.
We spend hours in google & Youtube to learn Adobe XD for designing & prototyping.
Spend hours in Microsoft Powerapps to create a working app including the generation OTP Data validation etc.,

What we learned

Effective communication.
Improve as a Team Player.
Use FFDC Design Thinking tools.
List of APIs available and can be utilized.
Adobe XD
Microsoft Powerapps.

What's next for FinEasy Banking App

Fully develop the Android/IOS app.
Utilize FFDC API services - Account Information, Alerts, Customer Profile, Financial Transactions and Payment Beneficiary.
Utilize *ML and AI * to observe the transaction behavior and detect Frauds.