How would you improve a Payment App?

If someone asked me this question, I would never jump on to the improvements directly.

In fact, if I really want to be able to improve a particular payment app, one needs to first define the goal of the payment app. Clearly define your target group, then frame your strategy to reach that point. Start listing down the most critical pain points of that particular target group. You can come up with ideas, which you can think of as a new feature. Roughly understand how to build that feature, in order to access the effort estimate to build it. From business point of view, think of how much impact you are going to make with it. Lastly, define metrics to measure if you are able to reach your goal or not with this feature.

So here is an example:

Here I am selecting Paytm as the payment app I want to improve.

Vision

Paytm wants to bring half a billion Indians into the mainstream economy through its financial services. Paytm wants to leverage its capabilities and value propositions to increase its market position.

Goal

1. To increase user base

2. To increase engagement

Target Customer — Individual Users

Here we are choosing are target user as any literate smartphone user seeking cashless transaction within India.

Pain Points

· Security: Money should go to the correct person. Money should be credited and not debited if that is the understanding of user

· Expense tracking

· Investments

· Expectation to get Loyalty benefits

· Easy loan

Here I am prioritizing the pain points as : Security, expectation to receive Loyalty benefits.

My reason being Investments and easy loan are already present in Paytm and these spaces are pretty crowded; And expense tracking won’t directly help us meet our goal

Strategy

· To aim to make the app more secure for payments, if we build trust then user base will increase

· To provide a delight factor for users, to reward them for loyalty

Below I will be explaining the features, meant to solve problem of security and loyalty respectively. I am defining the ball park estimates for it and the benefits I am likely to see with its implementation: -

Features

Above, I am choosing the idea of implementing Loyalty cards since it is showing possibility of more impact Vs effort to make the same.

Metrics

• Increase in no. of transactions daily
• Increase in % of Return Customers out of total customers using the app

The above metrics clearly tell us how the implementation of loyalty cards will help better our metrics targeting our goal of increasing retention.