Project Background
This project focuses on the creation of a digital banking app paired with a financial management experience (FMA) to acquire new customers and increase Amar Bank's third party funding.
As the Product Designer, I worked across two major streams:
1. Designing the banking onboarding flow (account creation, KYC)
2. Providing design directions to tailor a white-label financial management app to fit Indonesian user behaviors, financial literacy, and market expectations.
Role: Product Designer
Scope: UX Strategy, Visual Design
Time: 3 months
Background Context
Amar Bank had become widely known for Tunaiku, its high-growth digital lending product.
However, the bank’s loan-to-deposit ratio (LDR) grew increasingly unbalanced as loans expanded faster than deposits.
To operate sustainably and support continued lending growth, Amar Bank needed to:
1. Strengthen its funding portfolio
2. Increase retail savings deposits
3. Build brand relevance in consumer financial services
Strategic Direction
Because Amar Bank lacked strong brand equity compared to large Indonesian banks, a traditional savings product alone would not attract users. The solution was to introduce a value-added service (VAS) that provides immediate personal benefit and becomes the behavioral anchor for retention.
This VAS took the form of a Financial Management App (FMA):
• Expense tracking.
• Spending insights
• Custom saving “Stashes” (goal-based savings for travel, lifestyle needs, etc)
This FMA would serve as the front door → savings account creation funnel.
Users would first engage with their spending insights, then be guided naturally toward opening a savings account to fund their goals.
Delivery Constraints
To meet OJK’s accelerated licensing timeline, Amar Bank partnered with Maven, a US-based fintech offering white-labeled digital banking and FMA solutions.
Amar Bank’s internal team focused on:
• Account creation
• KYC / identity verification
• Operational data collection
• Regulatory compliance
Maven delivered the base FMA experience, while Amar Bank provided:
• Localization direction
• UX adaptation to Indonesian literacy levels
• Market-specific behavioral insights
• UI adjustments to match local expectations and banking patterns
The challenge was to align regulatory requirements, user needs, and technical limitations within a very short timeline.
Problems
Design Process
• Research
• Design Strategy
• Architecture
• Design Principles
• Outcome
• Key Learnings
Research
We conducted several research (desk research, surveys and in-depth interview) to:
• Identify early adopter persona
• identify user needs and behavior in banking and financial management
The outcome of this research process is to:
• identify the essential features for our banking and FMA MVP (minimum viable product)
• shape the strategy to tailor FMA app to meets Indonesian customer needs & behavior
Profile of Early Adopter
• Indonesian urban millennials, especially the married ones, was our primary segment as they have a stronger predisposition to save and manage their finance more regularly.
Banking and Financial Management Behavior
• Indonesian millennials want a seamless banking experience that allows them to transact easily across different payment methods.
• Given their low financial literacy, this user segment prefers a simple financial management to evaluate whether their spending behavior is still on track with their budget target.
• They're not interested in more sophisticated analytics to track their asset growth or analyze how their spending affects their credit score, etc.
The insights helped in shaping our product experience:
• Design a seamless account creation and KYC experience (while also complying to regulatory and operational needs)
• Simplifying the financial management app to match with Indonesian customers' behavior and mental model
Design Strategy
To meet the tight timeline, I took a practical approach in shaping the end-to-end product journey. These are key pillars used in our design process:
Use the same visual language to create a cohesive, consistent user experience across all touch points
• Given that this prototype will be redesigned at a later phase, I created a temporary mini design system that is derived from Moven's app and Amar Bank's branding identity.
• The color scheme and typography hierarchy serve as the visual elements that tie the account creation flow and FMA experience together.
• However, we also worked with a branding agency (Biro) to craft the visual language for the future Senyumku app.
Phase 1.0 Visual Language
Phase 2.0 Visual Language
Craft an approachable brand persona and compelling narrative tailored to our key demographics
• To distinguish our products in a saturated market, I shared the research insights to Biro and gave directions on the brand persona and narrative angles they could employ to craft their strategy – while also giving them space to experiment.
• I advised them to create a brand persona that evokes the image of a trusted advisor who's reliable, wise and approachable. This is to demystify Indonesian millennials' fear and intimidating image of financial products.
Initial Brand Direction
Final Brand Concept
Localize FMA to Match Indonesian Experience
Despite the limit of customization, we managed to make adjustment to the FMA:
• Translate the fraction of thousand and millions of rupiah into typical abbreviations commonly found in banking app
• Increase color contrast to increase readability and accessibility – critical, given the common type of mobile phone that Indonesians have (low resolutions and small devices)
• Removal of advanced analytics and inessential features for our target audience
• Provide entry points to account creation on the digital stash
Create a seamless onboarding journey and a reliable support system
As our prototype only focuses on account creation and KYC (no transaction features), we need to win customer's trust by providing them:
• a frictionless and intuitive onboarding flow that's also connected to card delivery process (showing the legitimacy of our banking product);
• and a support system with a robust help center and access to our call center that answers their concerns and needs
Architecture
The scheme below shows the relationship between the products – Senyumku digital banking app and Moven's financial management app.
Key Flows
Registration
We utilized ID verification in the first step of registration to check the validity of user's identity and to cross-check with Amar Bank's customer database to see if they are a registered Amar Bank customer. If they are, user can jump straight into the “Debit Card Delivery Address” flow.
Eligibility Form
We also reduced the needs for registration steps by assessing their eligibility beforehand. By requiring user to fill their residential address, occupation, and source of income, we can determine whether they live in the area we service, and match our risk criteria.
If they match both criteria, then they can proceed to the card delivery address section.
Card Delivery Address
In this section, we've pre-filled the delivery address to be the same as the address stated in user's ID card. This design choice is based on a behavioral pattern noticed in Amar Bank, where the majority of customers used the address on their ID card for their loan contract.
However, we added a primer step where we introduced the bank card before asking their delivery address. This is to re-contextualize user's mental model as our testing revealed that many of them thought the purpose of this address is for loan contract delivery.
KYC Form
In the KYC section, users are required to go through a live call with our operational staff in order to verify their identity (by matching their appearance and the ID card photo submitted). If all of their data matches, then within 1 business day, their bank account is created and they will be onboarded to the FMA app.
Help Center
We also provided a Help Center section to answers the potential questions that may arise during account opening and KYC process (e.g the accessibility of app's features during account opening, account book availability, account freeze, etc).
To improve content search-ability, information is categorized based on topic, and we provide auto-suggestion on the search field.
Visual Examples
Below are some of the mockups created for the account creation flow and Help Center. Given that Help Center is hosted on the same website as Tunaiku, we had to rebrand it as "Tunaiku's Savings Account" to place it as part of Tunaiku's ecosystem. This would be corrected in the future phase (once Senyumku has its own website).
Outcome
The launch of this product led to business outcomes such as:
Increase of third-party funding and retail customers acquisition
This product allows Amar Bank to acquire new customers more quickly, which gave a fresh injection of funding to the retail lending as well.
A shift of Indonesian customers' brand perception of Amar Bank – from lending to a more holistic financial service provider.
As Senyumku's marketing rolled out to introduce this product, there was a growing interest in Indonesian millennials to open new savings accounts in Amar Bank. However, it would require more development and engagement strategies to retain them.
Key Learnings
Alignment with multiple third-parties and stakeholders brought a new challenge to the delivery of this project.
• I learned to identify the constraints of each parties and make pragmatic decisions based on the key priorities of this project: creating a functional prototype that meets industry regulation and operational requirements.
• This means there are certain design quality that needs to be slightly compromised in order to achieve the goal in time while upholding the essential ones to maintain a cohesive experience across all products.
Learning product strategy, specifically how to introduce VAS (value-added service) offering to increase product adoption while also complying to financial regulation.
• This is the first time I learned how a product can be built on top of another – in order to attract new customers.
• While this became a challenge on the design process, however it helped me to think design and products in a more systemic manner.
