XME Pay: redefining an
m-payments ecosystem

Intesa Sanpaolo bank

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The human-centered approach is now central to the finance industry, as banks have become savvy in how to best connect to their customers’ needs and desires.

As part of this trend, Intesa Sanpaolo asked Experientia to collaborate in the ideation and development of innovative features for a payment app (XME Pay).

3 things to know

A step forward for digital and mobile payments

The app is designed to be simple and immediately usable by a wide range of users. It also provides new services and functionalities, to improve on existing solutions.

Working in agile mode

To make development faster, we experimented with hybrid modes of prototyping, UX/UI design and agile methodologies. This helped ensure an efficient process and technically feasible solutions: concepts translate insights into actionable innovation opportunities to be prioritized, prototyped and evaluated. They took the form of platform or service visualizations, product design sketches, feature ideas, interaction and user interface solutions.

Ongoing checks with service users

To speed up the process of prototype testing and design iterations, we carried out several test rounds (with young users, seniors, professionals and families).

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Context

Mobile and contactless payments continue to grow at an astonishing rate in Italy. In this context, Intesa Sanpaolo needed to quickly develop an effective mobile solution, able to compete both with the solutions provided by the main market players (Apple, Google) and with new innovative local players (SatisPay).

Challenge

Experientia was asked for a support during the contextual research, the definition of service concepts and prototypes, and the usability tests.

Research

Experientia conducted 16 contextual interviews in Milan and Naples, 10 with end-users and 6 with merchants. The interviews allowed us to identify payment behaviors and routines, and to generate ideas for accessory services such as discount management and loyalty cards.

Design

The study of the concept features was fundamental in the definition of the first and subsequent prototypes. Working in Agile, it was possible to quickly carry out several iterations of the application, and to test the functions with users in special sessions: some were dedicated to usability testing (training evaluation), others to specific insights, with different solutions in comparison (A/B testing).

Impact

The final solution was then developed and released in the summer of 2018, and was adopted in the first six months by 1.2 million customers (18% of the bank’s multi-channel customers).