TransferWise

By: Natan Nikolic

In: Portfolio

3 min read

30 Aug 2012

Redesign that enabled a fintech startup to challenge banks by gaining users’ trust. A combination of soft rebrand, UX design, and clever marketing led to a splashy launch, fast growth, Series A round, and beyond.

Context

Company: TransferWise (now Wise)
Timeframe: 2011–2012
Role: UX/UI Design Consultant

Unfair exchange rates and hidden fees of traditional banks drove founders Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus to invent what TechCrunch called the "Skype of currency exchange." At the time, the company had just secured Seedcamp funding and operated an MVP with a few thousand users and a handful of supported currencies. The signal for market demand was strong, but the website suffered from high bounce rates, low conversion, and low repeated transfers.

Mission

The founders understood that UX design was a powerful lever for accelerating the company’s growth. They hired me to help them improve user acquisition and overall product stickiness.

We quickly realized that trust was the biggest obstacle. Despite the company’s no-brainer value proposition, its radically new p2p model, no formal bank status, and a plethora of online scam stories by other vendors contributed to users’ risk-aversion.

We had to transform a scrappy, unknown startup into a credible financial service.

Contributions

I worked closely with the founders on product audit and setting the direction for the first redesign. Individual contributions include:

Correctly diagnosed trust as the core problem with qualitative and quantitative analyses (traffic analytics)
Advised for transparency as a cornerstone of product and marketing activities to position the company as a more trustworthy alternative to banks, which obfuscate poor business terms with complexity
Aligned the new website’s visual language with consumers’ expectations of financial institutions and startups, which served as a brand redesign experiment
Articulated the winning pitch by explaining the value proposition with a single landing page and colloquial language
Improved conversion rate by optimizing transfer flow steps, required fields, and applying other best practices
Designed UX+UI of the entire digital product consisting of transfer flow, user account dashboard, marketing landing pages, blog, and support section
Advised on early marketing activities and art-directed ads

Results

Performance: Significant lift in conversion rate, repeated transfers, and LTV (reported but undisclosed)
Legacy: Core architecture and solutions still in use today
Impact: Secured Series A funding and went on to achieve unicorn status

Highlights

Original home page prior to the redesign

1. Live transactions map; 2. Cost comparison SEO landing page template; 3. Support section; 4. Corporate blog article

Redesigned transaction process with details step optimized for ease of input and trimmed with optional business and KYC compliance fields

1. Review and confirtm step; 2. Payment call-to-action step; 3. Confirmation screen; 4. Account dashboard with payments history

Credits

Copywriting: Villu A.
Engineering: Bogdan D. & Alexander L. @ DefaultValue

Natan Nikolic — Freelance product designer based in London. Before founding about:blank studio, he was VP of Product at Celtra, and helped European entrepreneurs built startups 0-1.