Introducing stocks into the Moneybox app
Why adding stocks?
Because people were requesting stocks
Before this project, Moneybox offered only 2 types of investment assets: mutual funds and ETFs. We started seeing that our customers wanted to invest in stocks as well—they requested it frequently, and we had data to back this up.
We wanted to reduce churn
Without stocks, we started seeing people leave the app for competitors like Freetrade.
And we wanted to appeal to advanced investors
When Moneybox first started, it targeted customers who didn't know how to invest at all, as well as beginner investors.
After a few years live, the app was no longer appealing only to people who had no idea how to invest, but also to people who take investing more seriously and are more savvy with their finances. We wanted to evolve Moneybox's investment proposition to appeal to them and attract this customer base.
Our MVP process
Discovery
We didn't have much quant data to work with, but we knew things like the number of feature requests we got and what stocks customers wanted to buy. We ran surveys and also had a round of 14 interviews with existing customers. I ran and organized the sessions—planning, recruitment, writing scripts, and scheduling. I also trained team members who wanted to be part of the research phase, like the PMs.
Discovery outcomes
We uncovered 2 personas:
The beginner, passive investor
This customer told us that Moneybox worked well as it was. They valued the simplified design and tasks in the app, which are more user friendly compared to other financial apps out there. They were not interested in stocks and didn't know much about them.
The advanced, active investor
These financially savvy customers were the ones requesting stocks in the app. These customers invest in stocks and funds using a core and satellite investing strategy, where index funds are the core investments (which they got from Moneybox), and their satellite investments were stocks and sometimes crypto currencies (which they got from our competitors).
These 2 personas had very different needs, which posed an interesting challenge. Based on our findings and business priorities, we decided to focus on the advanced, active investor. This would give us the opportunity to elevate our proposition, potentially increase our wallet share and also prevent people leaving the app. However, adding more investment assets to the app would potentially make the experience more complicated for beginner investors who valued simplicity in the app and were our biggest customer base.
Defining our value proposition
We presented the research outcomes to the Senior team at Moneybox, communicating the 2 types of customers we'd identified and what each valued about the app. To guide the Senior team in making this decision, we explored various concepts.
The Senior team decided to target advanced investors, which meant adding stocks to the app.
We'd also identified that one of the pain points when buying stocks was deciding when to buy them, so we decided to add a feature to invest weekly into stocks—just like the existing one for funds. This was part of our value proposition, since there weren't many apps or platforms that supported this feature at the time.
MVP definition and metrics
To define our MVP, we (myself, our Jr Designer and PMs) came up with low-fi concepts and put them in front of the team. We had really tight deadlines, so we involved the Engineering team in estimations very early on. We'd created 2 different concepts, and those sessions helped us decide which one to go for and define the MVP. Our metrics were:
Check out the MVP prototype
Results
All results and metrics are confidential. However, I can say we had a nice surprise when we saw how many people were buying weekly stocks! Our value proposition was exactly that, but we thought customers wouldn't adopt weekly stocks right when we released. It was really cool to see it pay off.
Thanks for reading!
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