iGaranti – revolutionising the way we bank

We are living in the age of the connected customer and combining this with Turkey’s young and dynamic population, meant that Turkey’s second largest private bank, Garanti, had to create a banking service to meet the needs of the country. Almost 60% of the Turkish population are aged between 15-54 years old and under half of the population are under 30.

Turkey has a population of 74.7m people and 35m of these have Internet access, making it 5th in Europe for Internet accessibility. Furthermore there are 65.8% mobile subscribers and 50% of these have access to 3G. Turkey is also a hotspot for Facebook usage with more than 30m users, ranking it number four in the world. Turkey’s Internet connectivity offered Garanti a real opportunity to create a digital service that would allow its customers to take control of their finances and do all of their banking through their mobile.

The iGaranti service does not just mean that customers can do their banking whenever and wherever, but that they can also take control of their money, which is important in a country where 88% of people are credit card holders.

Fjord completed in-depth research to build customer profiles of Garanti customers, looking at their lifestyles to build a thorough understanding of what they needed from their bank to make their lives easier. All of this research and profiling was built into the iGaranti service which is targeted at 25-45 year-olds.

iGaranti is a mobile dashboard offering customers access to a comprehensive range of personal finance tools. iGaranti was devised specifically for mobile devices and has been built around a set of modules that aggregate wallet, savings, loans and offers much like individual apps.

The service enables its half a million mobile banking customers to create their own customised banking suite based on their individual needs and to manage their finances in real time from their mobile devices.

Deep social integration across Facebook, Twitter and FourSquare, allows iGaranti customers to send secure payments to friends via Facebook, tweet relevant offers across their social networks and even redeem location-based shopping offers while on the move. This was incredibly important for Garanti customers, due to their love for social media.

The launch of the iGaranti service has received extremely positive feedback from customers and the design and digital community. The launch of the service has resulted in global media coverage and really shone the spotlight on Turkey and Garanti for digital innovation in banking. Both Garanti and Fjord have spoken at conferences across the world including, MobileBeat in San Francisco, all centered around innovation in mobile banking.

Customers have praised the service, some comments received on social media include: “@iGaranti will lead the future of mobile banking,” “I think it will replace my wallet soon” and “I like this @iGaranti stuff, not like a dull old school banking app, it’s very fun and social.”

To date 100,000 customers have downloaded the iGaranti service and there are 75,000 active users. In addition Garanti has gained 5,000 new digital customers.

The most popular apps to date are the Moneybar, which allows customers to forecast how much they will spend, Transactions, Smart Offers and Social Network, thereby emphasizing that the heavily socially integrated nature of the service along with new services (offers and forecasting) is something that suits the needs of Garanti’s customers.

We started the project with discovery and user research to understand the users’ needs, motivations and desires. We also looked at how their users banking needs are evolving in today’s hyper connected world.

During the research phase we used many tools and methods to capture each and every detail of the user, their banking experiences and insights helped us shape the product at a later stage. Equipped with this knowledge we moved into initial concept exploration sketches and prototypes that were used to validate our concepts and design assumptions from the users and bank stakeholders.

After these validations, we prioritized concepts and features that needed to be part of the product. With that concept and feature framework, we began to craft user experience and user interface design to make the product tangible and so that it is visually stunning, easy and desirable to use.

During the discovery phase we realized that mobile first should be the approach for this project to be able to suffice the needs of hyper connected users around which we were designing the iGaranti service.