zopa

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Kicking off the journey for the UK's oldest fintech from peer-to-peer loans to a digital bank with a heart

Role, client etc...

I worked closely with Zopa to validate their ideas for future business and positioning. I also supported the rebranding of Zopa from a product sense.

Agency
Albion

Role
Senior Product Designer

Client
Zopa

Year
2018

Overview

Zopa invented peer-to-peer lending in 2005. But as this innovation drew strong competitors into their market, they quickly realised they couldn’t survive as a niche product for early adopters.

Zopa also understood that whilst the business had a strong culture, it hadn’t yet translated this into a distinctive and precise positioning that would catapult them from the fringes of fintech to becoming a mainstream consumer brand.

What we did

Throughout a two-and-a-half-year relationship, we helped Jaidev and his senior team understand and test different trajectories for the business before translating the agreed vision into a new positioning, brand identity, and suite of digital products and services.

Validating a digital-only bank

UX•UI•prototyping

I led the design and prototyping of what the future bank would be. Validating different propositions on what Zopa was modelling for their step into banking.

This involved design validation in one-to-one interviews with the target digital-only audience while validating feature sets.

What we landed on was a human chatty helpful persona and design language for a bank. Reassuring and educating on the complexity of the different financial products they were offering.

The original Zopa proposition appeals to financially literate early investors in peer-2-peer investment. The new bank potentially appealed to a sub-prime and digitally savvy but less financially affluent younger audience.

Getting a future bank ready for launch

UX•UI

I also lead the brand expression with the Zopa design teams to bring the brand to life in the first iteration. We worked in design sprints to create the website for the brand launch and ways to get the brand to life in their app.