Barclays – Digital Receipts
Why do we receive a piece of paper with a breakdown of what we’ve just purchased in a shop, but can’t see it in our banking app/website?
My task was to reduce phone calls to our support helpline, through design thinking we came up with a world’s first B2B SaaS business.
Core team
Design Lead – Matthew Higgins (me)
Senior Designer – Alan Lau
Product Owner – Sophie Hayes
Researcher – Guy Simpson
Impact
Built a new SaaS business that generated ~£400,000 profit PA
Licensed it to fintech competitors Monzo & Starling
Reduced customer calls by 13%
Increased NPS by 5
Gained 8 new corporate customers for Barclays
Research
Data
9% of all calls are customers checking for fraud, and 37% of those enquiries were due to mistakes our side and misunderstanding of data.
Analytics from call centre
Customers
“I had recently had £8.49 leave my account from A LUXEMBOURG, LLU. I had no idea what that means, turns out it was Amazon?”
Recorded complaints calls
Colleagues
"I spend a lot of my day talking to customers helping them understand a specific transaction. They always come in to speak to us directly thinking it wasn't them."
Branch colleague during field research
So, what is the problem?
The quality of our database for transactional data is very poor. Customers aren't able to understand their payments, resulting in lots of call centre and branch staff time.
How do we solve it?
My thinking was to organise and facilitate a GV Design Sprint, a tried and tested method in solving complex problems, quickly.
Sprint concept;
Digital receipts 🧾
Why can’t a customer tap on the £82.97 payment made at John Lewis and see that it was a jumper, Google mini and chopping board? Why in this age do I get a piece of paper but there's no digital equivalent within my banking app?
We could start by partnering with our corporate clients like John Lewis and it would be a win for them, Barclays and the customer.
Sketch
Out of all of our ideas, we ended up with a concept that replicated the paper receipt. You can tap on a transaction and see a breakdown of the spend and time/location.
Prototype
I then had a day to design and build a prototype to test this idea to see how much of a need this was. We came up with additional ideas whilst during this, like being able to return the item or claim rewards.
Validate
We then tested the idea with anyone with a retail bank account to see if they found this use, thankfully they did.
Getting buy-in
With this needing quite a large engineering effort, the product owner and I sat down together to create a business case.
♻️ Save the planet
Saves businesses money having to print receipts, the majority of which are impossible to recycle due to them containing the same chemicals used in single-use plastic.
💵 Commercial opportunities
If Barclays can see detailed transactional data, we can possibly profit from it. If it's a flight to Spain, why not surface live foreign currency rates, or use it as a timely reminder to get travel insurance
🤷♂️ Proof of purchase
If you lose a receipt, most places won't allow you to return your product. Some will if bought online, but many don't as there is no proof of purchase. This would help banks with the thousands of credit disputes they receive yearly.
🥵 Difficult for businesses
It's a great feature for Barclays' business customers. Many business owners rely on receipts as part of their end of year taxes. They are required by law to keep them for a number of years, resulting in taking up office space and being overwhelming to manage.
Helping start-ups
After the initial pitch was granted budget, we looked at how we’d deliver this. Instead of building this in-house we spoke to the Relationship Manager at our incubator Rise to see if there were any start-ups applying for residency that were wanting to do anything in this space.
Barclays x Flux
In the end we found a team that we’re keen to slightly pivot their original idea and built a relationship to work with them to create a business that would allow us to not only have digital receipts, but also turn the offering into a B2B SaaS.
Beta testing
Before pushing live, We wanted to test the usability of the receipts page, so decided to use Barclays Launchpad, which is a beta app available to ~50,000 Barclays customers.
It allows them to provide direct feedback and we track feature usage with embedded analytics. We also ran an A/B test for a couple of very small differences to make sure that we had the best design.
B2B SaaS
Now that Receipts was out there and Barclays was known to be the first, we began talking to other banks to see if they were interested in the feature, after long negotiations and discussions both Monzo and Starling were our first 2 customers.
This was beyond our measure of success, we never thought one of the “cool” fintechs would be a customer using the tech of one of the “old dystopian banks”.
