Context
As COVID-19 unfolded, the effects of the global pandemic began to show in our markets and for our customers. Depending on the stage of market lockdown, 50 - 80% of customers reported their income, livelihood, or business had been affected by the situation.
Purpose
As a business, we sprinted to identify ways to show up as a true financial partner for customers, during COVID-19 and beyond. Our strategy spanned the following pieces:
COVID-19 Resource Hub: trustworthy info on health, safety, and financial preparedness
COVID-19 Rebuild Fund: 0% interest loans for small businesses
1:1 Financial Coaching: personalized sessions to help manage finances in crisis
COVID-19 Resource Hub
As a first step, we wanted to create a source of trustworthy information for customers — spanning general information on health & safety, to deeper dives on financial preparedness during the crisis. We spun up the following websites and my team shipped a configurable banner notification into the app to allow us to keep customers up-to-date with the latest.
COVID-19 Rebuild Fund
We launched the Tala COVID-19 Rebuild Fund to sustain and support our markets, starting with small business loans. We designed a higher amount, 6-month, 0% interest loan for small business owners providing essential community services (e.g. health, food, clean water, transportation).
By investing in small businesses, we hope to multiply our impact within communities and our market economies during this time. For more details, check out the announcement on LinkedIn & our blog here.
From idea to launch, we shipped this initiative in one sprint and are now serving hundreds of customers in our markets with these special loans. Stay tuned as we monitor the impact of this program and share the inspiring stories of our customers, serving their communities during this time.
[Update: See our latest report on the impact of these community support loans, as of July 2020.]
1:1 Financial Coaching
Financial coaching is a pilot program offering free, personalized coaching sessions to help users manage their financial lives. Today, this is oriented around COVID-19 and each session is tailored to the customer’s topic of interest: such as managing stress, creating a budget, or using savings responsibly.
We had piloted financial coaching with small batches of customers previously, but as a largely manual & hacky process, the test runs never achieved scale. This occasion gave us the imperative to scope and ship a productized version of financial coaching, so we could scale the program with deeper engagement. As a business, this allows us to not only serve more customers, but to coach a large enough sample size to properly measure outcomes from coaching & iterate accordingly.
From a product perspective, we shipped:
Experiment framework: dynamically segmenting users into control & treatment groups
App experience: a new section of the app to house the coaching lifecycle and follow-up financial education content
Content hooks: new triggers for our content management platform, allowing us to extend the engagement beyond the 1:1 coaching session.
Internal tools: google sheets no more … a new tab within our internal admin panel to allow coaches to review background and publish personalized recommendations to customers.
Data integration: an integration with a web-based survey platform to unlock exploratory analyses on the coaching session data.
Phew! And we got it all done with a small team, in two sprints. I’m excited to see our learnings roll in as we ramp up and grow the program in upcoming months.
Outcomes
With early data, up to 40% of customers felt supported by our efforts providing the Resource Hub websites and 0% interest Rebuild Fund loans. 70% of customers have expressed interest in financial coaching, and we look forward to growing and iterating the program in upcoming months.
Shipping products during a pandemic is a funny thing — getting the right thing out to customers quickly took precedent over rigorous experimentation. If anything, it was just the kick we needed to make progress that we had long spoken about, but were still just “ideas.”
This time has amplified pain points in our customers’ lives — from uneven cash flow, to vulnerability to shocks. In many ways, it’s been a driving force for us — to design with more urgency and conviction; to launch what will create resilience today; and to help our customers’ rebuild in the future.