Helping Afterpay expand beyond buy now pay later through personalised banking experiences and customer-centred storytelling.
The situation
Before its acquisition by Block, Afterpay had its sights on banking, targeting an audience they believed was underserved: young women worldwide. We joined as Afterpay where rapidly establishing a core product team building the baseline mobile banking functions and starting to bring on the marketing and support services as they approached their go-to-market
The unsaid tension in the ambition
Our early research uncovered a clear obstacle: Afterpay’s buy now pay later service had fuelled massive growth and heavy criticism. Without addressing these trust issues head-on, scaling into banking — where trust is everything — would be an uphill battle.
Framing the challenge
How do we help customers reimagine their relationship with money — and trust Afterpay to lead the way?
Process breakdown
Deep audience understanding
With our directive in place, we aimed to truly understand audiences’ relationship with money, wellness generally and financial wellness.
What we learned
Managing your money is a whole ecosystem, no one single institution, app, or tool is involved. It’s a combined bespoke system that people build for themselves that scales with context, situation, and ambition.
The journey
While the ecosystem is fragmented, people can generally be placed at stages of the same journey, and the transitional moment is almost always intrinsically motivated but externally guided.
A working hypothesis
At this stage, an idea was forming. For the intrinsically motivated, was it possible to provide guidance for users to reach confidence alongside the utility needed to get there?
The behaviours
So we defined a spectrum of behaviours, emotions, considerations and challenges the potential customer faced using their money.
The first best customer
The range of behaviours provided important context, but the focus needed to be targeted. At the top end, we had people who had already found the help they needed and at the lower end were people who were not ready or interested yet.
The middle is where we landed with a mix of intrinsic motivation but needing to build confidence and self trust.
The entry point
Breaking down the range of use cases for various services, there were clear areas where switching costs were low and people were willing to try new services or use them to take advantage of starting offers.
Redefining the mission
To help people build a healthier relationship with money through personalised guidance that goes beyond generic rules. By balancing emotional and rational needs, we create partnerships that foster long-term financial confidence.
Where competitors see data points, we see people—and we meet them where they are to guide them toward a money-positive future.
Defining the vision
Establishing the brand
With a common pattern of beliefs and behaviours that hinder financial growth and security, the antidote was cultivating a “money-positive” mindset.
The content experience from out-of-app to in-app journey
For this to be effective, we needed to be where the audience was as much as assisting through the utility. The experience and the message needed to be considered beyond the in-app user flows.
Detailing the user journey
Mapping the MVP feature and content sets
Developing their narrative
Being strictly factual with the presentation of money is necessary, but not the whole story. However, telling the entire story is highly subjective and risks abstracting reality.
We developed a framework to help keep storytelling devices balanced between rational and emotional needs to help users understand their money, tell their stories and hear others.
Designing the system
The framework we developed evolved into a system that empowered users to engage with their finances in a meaningful way.
By integrating tools for storytelling and visualisation. The system enabled users to better understand their financial journey while fostering trust in Afterpay’s vision of a “money-positive” mindset.
Key elements of this system included:
- Visual tools to break down complex financial data into digestible insights.
- Narrative features that allowed users to share and learn from others’ financial journeys, creating a sense of community.
- Personalised prompts that encouraged incremental behaviour changes aligned with long-term financial wellness.
Defining taxonomies and visual logic
Conceptualising the delivery devices
Bringing it all together
Creating the templates
Extentending the format to IRL
Team composition
Our team
- Experience design lead
- UX and UI designers
- Strategists
- Researchers
Afterpay’s team
- Product managers
- Product marketers
- Product design teams
- User Researches
- Engineering teams
- Associated teams that primarily served the BNPL services
My contribution
- Developed the plan and led its execution
- Facilitated workshops and cross-functional collaboration
- Coordinated activities between teams
- Contributed concepts and provided design critique