LuLu Money,
All-in-one
Payments Platform

My Role

Lead Designer,
Lead Researcher

Duration

Planned - 2 months
Actual - 2 months

Design Team Size

5 (Researcher,
Junior designers,
Visual designer)

Key Responsibilities

Led the design and research

Facilitated stakeholder & user interviews

Fostered cross-functional collaboration

Collaborated with multiple stakeholders to ensure compliance across MENA and SEA region

Requirement

LuLu Money approached M2P with a need to design and develop a payments mobile app.

The LuLu Money app, in 2020 was a simple app with limited features. Though LuLu exchange had a plethora of digital solutions / products, in reality, LuLu Money had just a remittance-only app. This app also fell short in delivering a satisfactory user experience which failed to build trust, and left the users hesitant to use it.

Over the years, LuLu Money had built a strong network in the Middle Eastern and South East Asian countries and became popular for cross-border transfer services. Despite that, LuLu faced significant challenges in the digital ecosystem and hoped to capitalise on this potential opportunity. LuLu also recognised that their customers were relying on multiple apps to fulfil their everyday financial needs.

With the onset of COVID-19 lockdown restricting people indoors, LuLu realised the pressing gap in their digital sector. To remain relevant and competitive, LuLu decided to revamp the existing app and pursue a plan to launch a comprehensive payments app. This new app would include features such as a multi-currency wallet, QR payments, bank transfers, and other services that people use in their daily lives.

Additionally, while most users and businesses knew LuLu as a popular remittance service provider, LuLu sought to change this perception and evolve into a comprehensive 'all-in-one payment' platform by expanding their services to cover all aspects of payments.

The critical success factors set for the Payments app were

Increased customer acquisition

Increased volume of digital transactions by minimum 30%

Increased operational efficiency

Increased customer engagement and loyalty

Faster, fool proof and efficient money transfers

To be perceived as an “easy-to-use, intuitive, friendly, transparent”

Process

Collaborated with key business stakeholders to understand their

Business strategy - goals, brand values, critical success factors

User, market, and existing challenges

Time and cost constraints

Design Strategy

Prioritized the requirements of both business and user

Ensured consistency, scalability, and flexibility across diverse geographies and cultural landscape of the MENA and SEA region through components based design, enabling future expansions and readily customizable product

Linguistic support

Practical Constraints

Travel ban made accessing real users difficult, resulting in a significant gap in understanding the needs of the blue collared users. This necessitated considering only a few representative users and making suitable assumptions.

Differing regulatory and security requirements across countries could potentially lead to multiple compliance and legal issues. To ensure compliance, a regulatory expert was engaged into the project midway. This helped reduce budget overruns and speed up the product development.

Components had to be refined and redesigned in some cases to ensure design support for 8 languages.

Development

Focused on the practical implementation of the design through consistent engagement with Tech and development teams, thereby ensuring design feasibility and prioritizing efficient API integration

Redesigned Interfaces from LuLu Money App

Outcome

The newly designed ‘LuLu Money’ app achieved remarkable success and was well received among both existing and new customers.

Recognized as the "Best Fintech Solution" by Leaders in Fintech Awards 2021, for “Impact & Innovation”.

3X increase in user adoption

Minimum 3X increase in number of services used by customers

4X increase in digital transactions, surpassing LuLu’s goal to convert 30% transactions to digital

4.17% increase in market share in the MENA region

With 1 million user downloads, remained among the highest rated apps (4.7 stars), rated by 34K+ users

100% compliance across different geographies in MENA and SEA region