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Cash isa savings product

People's wealth is being eroded by greedy banks and high inflation. Plum aims to give people a fair return.

mockup of Cash ISA product for Plum

the problem

Plum needs a jumpstart

It's November 2023 and through this year Plum's progress had stalled due to regulatory issues in the EU. In addition, users were primarily using Plum for short-term savings, with 88% of money deposited is withdrawn with the same month.

cossie livs takes grip

The UK was feeling the pinch and the "cost-of-living" crisis was a hot topic.  People were worried about increased mortgage repayments, winter heating bills and generally feeling worse off.

A MARKET PRIMED

Bank of England interest rates were at their highest level since 2008 and while high street banks relied on their customer's default bias to continue offering measley rates,  neobanks and e-money firms saw their opportunity to create win-win situations for them and their customers.

KEY PROBLEMS

  • 44.2 % AUM growth
  • £118m in non-interest earning accounts
  • 88.62% Net Deposits

SITUATION IN THE UK

  • 5.25% BoE interest rate
  • 4.60% CPI Interest
  • 4.75% Moneybox's Cash ISA

PLUM's CASh ISA performance

RESULTS

198%

Plum reaches £1b in AUM

£15m

Interest earned by users

56.97%

Net Deposits (down from 88%)

MY role | 

PRODUCT DESIGNER

Leading the product design aspect of this project, I worked alongside product management, developers, brand and marketing.

  • A clear product proposition
  • Create trust through transparency
  • Utilise existing Plum experiences to speed up design and production
Hypothesis – By offering the highest rate for a Cash ISA, Plum will be able to activate people out of their money inertia with their high street banks who offer little to no interest on their ISA products. 

product design lifecycle 

 In SUMMARY

COMPETITOR ANALYSIS

Cash ISAs are well established products and there are many, many competitors. Of the competitors we reviewed, they fell into either category:

  • High Street Bank
  • "The little guy"

In our analysis we were most interested in knowing

  • What interest rates were being offered
  • How easily customers could access their money
  • What other benefits or constraints are part of their Cash ISA product
  • Overall user-experience

From our analysis were able to establish a strategy to deliver a compelling product, on time.

  • Offer a higher rate than High Street banks to acquire a portion of their customers
  • Provide some easy access to money
  • Use additional benefits to convert users into subscribers
  • Replicate the best parts of competitors UX to design with confidence and speed.
Three screens from Monzo's Cash ISA onboarding process with UX analysis

USER RESEARCH

Default Bias

The biggest hypothesis and risk we faced was the default bias of users and how we could compel people with long-standing, low performing Cash ISAs to transfer their full accounts from High Street banks to Plum.

Through several online surveys and a week of user interviews, we never uncovered anything ground-breaking, but it did give us a lot of confidence we were on the right track.

Money talks

With the cost-of-living crisis, inflation at record high's and the Bank of England Interest also very high, people were shopping around for the best interest rate.
List of user interviewsSome answers to user interview questions

USER FLOWS

Our users flows were built at pace, we did this with minimal validation because we had confidence in our approach of harnessing competitors experiences and our existing modular experiences including Onboarding, Know Your Customer standards (KYC) and deposit/withdrawal modules.

These flows included:

  • Onboarding new & existing users to Cash ISA
    • Upselling other Plum features and products
  • Transferring existing ISAs from other providers
  • Making deposits
    • Including set-up of automated deposits
  • Withdrawals
    • With interventions to protect users from penalties set up for excessive withdrawals

 

An overview of user flows of high fidelity screens inside Figma

LAUNCH & ITERATIONS

During launch I took part in User Acceptance Testing to ensure that we captured as many bugs and issues prior to the product going live. This was a great collaborative effort with developers, product managers and other keen team members from around the business.

In our first month we saw over £343 million pounds in deposits. Making this our largest ever product launch!

A new type of user.

Alongside this peak of new users, we saw an influx of queries to our customer success team. We noticed that we were acquiring an older, higher net-worth user who expected traditional banking services something that we didn't fully appreciate it. 

Future iterations

As we continue to iterate on this product, we have no established a bit more of focus on what we call our Planner persona, ensuring that we can continue to retain this higher net-worth users long after interest rates go down.

Cash ISA depositsAge of Cash ISA usersIncome of Cash ISA users

Tracking progress and success

  • Graph of transfer-in providers
  • Median amounts of transfers

Key achievements

  • Optimising the onboarding and deposit flow to increase New User Deposit Rates to 72% for Cash ISA
  • Being part of a team that delivered Plum's most lucrative product to-date

what i learned from this project

Being adaptable to the business' needs makes it easier to achieve success in your work and for your team. 

In this case, removing perfectionism and focussing on a Minimum Viable Product we were able to launch a functional product, with a fantastic offering at the right time of year. 

In doing so, we were able to bring £636 million pounds for the business, which in turn helped us secure more funding as we strive towards profitability.

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