As financial services companies expand and improve their digital services, the importance of outpacing the competition and building products that can meet user expectations globally is an increasingly important task.
According to Boston Consulting Group, FinTech is projected to become a $1.5 trillion industry by 2030, expanding its percentage share of the global financial services revenue. Areas like APAC and EMEA represent growing opportunity areas for FinTech brands.
With this in mind, getting your product expansion into new markets, particularly international ones, right requires an intentional and research-backed approach.
A FinTech client asked us:
How can we solve usability and compatibility issues prior to launching our product in new global markets?
Our client needed to assess product usability, areas of friction, and opportunities for improvement as they began to expand their financial product globally. As they looked to move rapidly toward international expansion, they needed help ensuring their app worked seamlessly across new markets to encourage successful early adoption.
They turned to AnswerLab as their trusted partner for not only research execution, but also logistical and research ops expertise given the highly specialized international recruiting needs that could not be handled in-house with their own research team.
We answered:
To ensure research success, our Research Operations team worked with our specialized recruiting partners and vendors to reach international participants who were engaged with the client’s focus area and able to access the product on multiple platforms.
Initially, we started testing usability in a few preliminary international markets for the client, but the project soon developed into an ongoing rolling research program as we rapidly delivered high-quality international insights.
When recruiting participants for finance-focused studies, recruit criteria can be tricky, and sometimes your ideal participant may not be as common as you’d expect. Throughout this engagement, our client trusted our Research Ops team to call out when their ideal recruit criteria wasn’t feasible and pivot and adapt when necessary to ensure research stayed on track and on time.
We conducted individual task-based interviews with over 200 participants across 14 countries, including India, Brazil, Germany, Japan, Nigeria, France, and Indonesia. AnswerLab partnered with local moderators in the target markets to conduct sessions alongside AnswerLab UX Researchers. Additionally, we provided simultaneous translation for sessions conducted in languages other than English so the client could participate live or watch the recordings later.
Outcome:
Through ongoing usability testing, we identified a number of critical usability issues and provided recommendations prior to launch. As we expanded country to country, our team delivered ongoing insights at the speed of our client’s rapid development cycle and launch plans.
We identified everything from evaluative hard usability issues to prioritized opportunities that they were able to apply live or immediately following the research including:
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- software bugs
- tricky sign-up flows
- ID verification steps and improvements
- confusing language and feature comprehension
- competitive analysis in other markets
- ways to visualize and present user data
- translation missteps
- and more
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Learn how research operations and flexible engagements can help you reach complex target audiences and gain consistent UX research insights throughout any phase of your project.
