Empowering the unbanked segment in the Philippines with a mobile app

CLIENT
China Bank

SECTOR
Financials

REGION
Philippines

YEAR
2018

EXPERTISE
UI/UX Design

OUR ROLE
Research
Product Design
Interaction Design

Context

China Bank is a Philippine bank established in 1920. It was the first privately owned local commercial bank in the Philippines initially catering to the banking needs of Chinese-Filipino business people.

With a strong mobile phone user demographic and a fragmented and unbanked segment, the main objective of designing a mobile app for China Bank was to empower the unbanked segment in the Philippines. This was not an easy task, considering that the country has more than 7,000 islands, with at least 50 million Filipinos remaining unbanked.

The second (and unformal) goal of this project, was to help the company in shaping their approach to online banking.

Approach

The path towards digital transformation isn’t always easy. There were many challenges in shaping China Bank’s approach to online banking. This pushed us to be patient and to participate in a lot of workshops with the relevant departments of China Bank so they would have a deeper understanding of this topic.

We spent six months in designing this mobile app with meetings, presentations, and workshops with the cybersecurity, marketing, and branding departments (among others) in Manila.

On top of designing the usual and modern features such as Touch ID, Accounts Management, Transfers, and Branch/ATM locator in Augmented Reality, our main focus was to implement new ways of payment nationwide.

To do so, we designed specific features such as "Pay to Mobile" or "JUMP" (Just Use your Mobile Phone) which enables clients to pay or transfer funds to anyone with a mobile phone number. The recipient, who may not have a China Bank account, can withdraw the money through any of the Bank’s ATMs by performing a cardless withdrawal, or transfer the fund to his own bank account through JUMP’s ‘Deposit to An Account’ feature.

Impact

The China Bank mobile app has been released to the public and as of January 2023, 500,000+ installations have been made on Google Play.

The App also bags ‘Mobile Banking & Payment Initiative of the Year – Philippines’ award at the ABF Retail Banking Awards 2020.

China Bank app - Touch ID
China Bank app - Navigation
China Bank app - Dashboard
China Bank app - Cash Card
China Bank app - Real Estate Loan
China Bank app - UITF Account
China Bank app - Exchange Rate
China Bank app - Deposit to Account
China Bank app - Manage Checkbook
China Bank app - Pay or Transfer
China Bank app - Congratulations
China Bank app - Locate Us (AR view)

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