Case Study 03
Mobile Payments For
The Underserved
Wipit was the brainchild of telecom industry pioneers who saw an opportunity to provide an underserved community a way to make digital purchases.
Role
Head of Design, Employee #4
Wipit XFN Teams
UX, UI, Product, Project Management, Engineering, Growth, Customer Support
Mobile payments for the underserved
Objective
Launch a new telecom and fintech product that will introduce an underserved cash-based demographic to online and digital purchases.
Key Results
Wipit won a coveted RFP from HR Block and developed subsequent key partnerships. We successfully launched and supported thousands of customers and introduced digital cash payments to a community that had never before experienced the convenience of digital purchases. My team would go on to develop the mobile wallet products for Boost Mobile, Sprint Mobile and Ria Payments.
Launching from Scratch
No one had ever launched a product like Wipit in the pre-paid and cash based communities before. We were introducing essentially credit and digital payment products to an audience that had only ever used cash as their commodity. The initial task was explaining the product and helping customers trust in it’s viability when they couldn’t touch it like they were used to.
Winning Key Partnerships
One of Wipit’s biggest challenges was establishing loyalty and trust as a financial services provider. Boost Mobile was the first key to unlocking that - by showing that our product and brand could stand firm alongside one of the top 5 prepaid mobile providers gave us the leverage to show that our product was more than just a good idea.
Navigating a new landscape
Because Wipit was turning cash into digital payments, it was pioneering new processes in the financial space. This was early fintech. And as such, there was both questions and concerns from federal regulators. Successfully surviving this new world meant navigating the languages and requirements that hadn’t been created yet. Approvals required new approvals themselves and designs had to be perfect.
Creating one of the first mobile wallets
Before Apple Wallet existed and before Android Pay was live, Wipit was one of the first games in town. A lot of today’s mobile wallet experiences are evolutions of some of the early principles that we tested and utilized to ensure that audiences who were new to mobile technologies could use the product with little to no previous experience. It was critical that the UX and CX was simple and straightforward. People were trusting us with their hard earned cash and we need to prove that we would respect that.