Context
At Tala, our vision is to become the primary financial services provider for the emerging middle class. 1.7 billion adults (31% of the population) remain unbanked globally. In Mexico, 55% of adults are underbanked or unbanked. Unbanked users cite that they don’t need a bank account; don’t have enough money; had a bad experience with a bank; or find them too expensive, inconvenient, or complicated.
Purpose
We aim to provide users with a fair & safe place for users to store, use, and grow their money. By evolving from a digital lender to a digital account, we’re uniquely positioned to serve users across borrowing, transacting, and saving.
As our first step, our focus centers on providing a digital account with the following value props:
Easy to access & transact
Transparent fees & requirements
Strong customer service
Simple, reliable UX
Our first bet meant launching digital accounts with Tala debit cards, so users can access their money when they need it. Strategically, cards also represent a natural engagement feature & tremendous source of transaction data, enabling us to improve our underwriting and provide enhanced opportunities for customers in the future.
I led a cross-functional squad through product discovery, partner development, and kicking off product delivery.
Product Discovery
With a wide opportunity space, we started by defining our target segment research focus: understanding the un / underbanked population and their sentiments and needs around financial accounts. I set our research objectives, and worked with our research teams (US and Mexico) to design and implement the research.
We conducted shadowing, concept testing, quantitative surveys, persona development, and competitive benchmarking in order to understand these foundational financial needs of users in Mexico. This allowed us to narrow our problem space and solution to the account & debit card.
As we inched closer to launch, we employed mixed methods on specific research questions, from concept testing on card design / branding, to a data sharing longitudinal study with a digital wallet partner in MX.
Partner Development
We were quickly thrown into the deep end of payments processing and deposit holding institutions! There are many players involved to get accounts & cards into users’ hands, across the bank partner, the issuer processor, the card production house, and the card network. We ramped up on this ecosystem while evaluating partners on legal, commercial, and product / technical dimensions. I worked closely with our country leadership & legal teams to perform final diligence, confirm scope & joint timelines, and sign the MOU.
Ready for Dev
We had a design, we had a partner, and we were ready to put hands on keyboard. Our imperative was to maximize learning with the minimum scope to get accounts & cards into users’ hands. I onboarded a new engineering team, worked with design & engineering to prioritize our minimum feature set, finalized the specs & tickets, and kicked off our agile sprints. In parallel, I mapped out the workstreams, owners, and timelines across card production & fulfilment, customer servicing, and operations required for launch.
Outcomes
We had grown from a small team of seven at the beginning of the year, to a core Slack channel of nearly 40 people (!) After closing the partnership, setting up the program management, and kicking off product delivery, I transitioned off the squad to lead a new product discovery initiative (more details here).
Today, after many months of work — the cards are real, in users’ hands, and pretty good-looking. :) We’re excited to roll out our debit card (beta) program to users in Mexico in early Q1. As you can see, it was an enormous team effort from all corners of our organization (and these photos only scratch the surface!)
A challenging & incredible team effort. Cheers!
P.S.
My favorite quote from our lead engineer, on the day debit cards launched (alpha release):
”There’s a lot left to do.
The first thing is to get the color of the cards correct. Like first they gave us, like a jade color. We need to understand if this is useful to customers’ lives. We need to release a bunch of features.
And I hope this is just the beginning … We have a long road ahead of us. And I hope you all join us to build the next great product.“