Understanding how customers think of digital wallets

The growing popularity of digital wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, etc) meant that an understanding of how customers expected digital wallets to behave was necessary.

Through a series of focus groups, we learned that customers expected their digital wallet to be a facsimile of their physical card, underpinned by how they add a card to their digital wallet, how their cards are presented to them, and how they use it to make a payment in day-to-day situations.

Background

Let’s pretend you had a great night out with some friends last night. You went to a casual pub and recall buying a couple round of drinks for you and your 5 other friends. What you don’t remember is where you left your credit card 😨. So you hop onto your banking app and “lock” your credit card so that nobody can use it. You’re hoping that the card is back at the pub amongst a pile of lost credit cards. Looking down at your phone, you remember that you added your credit card to your phone’s digital wallet. You think to yourself: “Can I still use this card on my phone to pay for things?”

This is what we wanted to understand. More and more customers are adopting digital wallets and projects were starting to focus on building processes and experiences to cater to customers who used them frequently.

Problem Definition

Understand:

  1. What is their mental model for their payment methods?

  2. How do customers expect their digital wallets to behave across various situations?

Methodology

3 focus groups with 6 + 1 participants:

  1. People who don’t use digital wallets;

  2. People who use digital wallets on iOS devices; and

  3. People who use digital wallets on Android devices.

Findings

Mental model

Customers thought their digital card was a facsimile of their physical card. They thought that the physical card was a replica in digital form in their digital wallet. This was reinforced by three factors:

  1. When customers add a physical bank card to their digital wallet, they are asked to take a photo of their card (to capture the card details).

  2. When customers are presented with their cards in their digital wallet, they have the appearance of a physical card.

  3. When customers pay using their digital wallet, they mimmic the “tap and pay” gesture of their physical card.

Expected behaviour

As a result of their mental model, customers thought that their digital card mirrored the state of their physical card. If their physical card was locked or deactivated (from being lost or stolen/compromised), then they expected their digital card would also be locked or deactivated.

“I had misplaced my credit card and locked it just in case. I still needed to pay for things and I knew I had my card on my phone, so I unlocked my credit card and used my phone to pay. When I was finished, I went back to the app and locked my card again.”

Outcome

The findings of the research was summarised in a report and presented to project teams and designers across the Digital team. We identified opportunities for the card experience to be enhanced leveraging these findings and potential ways to increase the security of our customers’ finances.