MoneyGram

Overview

Role: Senior Designer
Team: Amber Wang, Andrew McGinnis, Jason LeBlanc, Kelsey Hopson, Kiara Stewart
Timeline: 2 months

I led a designer as our team facilitated activities like: ideation workshops, new feature/production prioritization, how-might-we activity, stakeholder interviews, empathy mapping, and the value prop canvas. We also provided outputs like: detailed research reports, personas, journey maps, competitive landscapes, the prioritization of products/features/functionality, an innovation canvas for future products, and SUS scores for existing products.

Project Goals

Prior to the pandemic, as well as post-pandemic, cross-border money transfer remains an important service to MoneyGram's customers.

They built an app and website that deliver on this customer need but hired Dialexa to assess their target demographic, any additional products and services they could offer their customers, and whether or not these new offerings were relevant to the customer journey. The research our team gathered aimed to inform MoneyGram of what is and isn’t working, where they should prioritize our efforts and any opportunities they have to differentiate themselves as they work to become more than just money transfer in the digital age.

User Personas

• We observed that most customers view MoneyGram as a modern and reliable service while non-customers associate the brand with strictly being a brick-and-mortar store.

• All customers believed their current money transfer solution was: Trustworthy, Reliable, Quick, Easy to Use, Credible

• The overarching themes we heard throughout the twenty-one customer interviews had to do with the convenience, speed, low fees, and reliability that MoneyGram offers. Additional reasons include having access to physical locations and the credibility MoneyGram earns from its proximity to larger brands.

• Themes that arose time and time again behind a lack of (more) engagement include MoneyGram being “just another option” in the pool of solutions, transaction fees, inconveniences on the recipient, and the lack of a unique offering.

Journey Map

Customers are primarily focused on financially supporting their families. Finding additional ways to support customers in this endeavor will deepen customer relationships.

• The mentality of customers and non-customers is fairly short-term; they are just focused on getting to the next day.

• Customers would appreciate more guidance on budgeting as well as where to invest.

• MoneyGram could act as more of a partner when it comes to loans and business transactions.

Design Opportunity: General Experience

• It is unclear to users if they are logged in or not, which means their UX may get disrupted later depending on the user flow they follow.

• Information hierarchy is unclear and there are multiple entry points to the same user flow, which creates user confusion (and muddy utilization data for MoneyGram).

• There are inconsistent interactions and content format between cards, creating friction and significantly increasing the learning curve.

Design Opportunity: Transfer Experience

• It is cumbersome to find/input a receiver for a first transfer and select a previous receiver for a repeat transfer

• There's an opportunity to begin engaging receivers earlier through/onto MGO (Ex: inviting receiver to become new MGO user, enabling receiver to initiate transfer).

• Transfer tracking—a source of negative emotion (Ex: anxiety) for a user—requires the user to take a significant number of steps to do rather than “meeting them where they are."

Design Opportunity: Communication

• The “voice of MoneyGram” feels fragmented and disjointed because communication is interspersed with “third-party” communication with few transitions that would make these touchpoints feel seamless to the user.

• Communication is abruptly injected into user flows and feels like impasses with the undue burden of figuring out next steps falling on the user.

Competitive Landscape

Following our competitive landscape, we brainstormed three concepts that would be valuable offerings to MoneyGram's customers.

Loyalty Program

• Incentivize sending higher value transfers, such as a tiered set of rewards based on incrementally higher thresholds of dollar amount sent.

• Incentivize receiver behavior, such as adopting MoneyGram Online (MGO) as a receive method.

• Integrate rewards for other forms of loyalty, such as staying active with MGO (Ex: surprise birthday discount on next transfer) or referring new loyal customers into the same system for a cohesive UX.

Digital Wallet

• Offer a debit card after establishing a digital wallet/stored balance.

• Increase the value of using a money transfer solution as a digital wallet solution (Ex: transferring a pre-paid debit card, rewards for receivers, family debit management).

• Incorporate use of the digital wallet/stored balance (and accompanying card) into the rewards system.

Currency/Value Conversion

• Regardless of customer interest in the quantitative study, this concept—especially mobile top-up—is a distraction with limited returns due to the competitive landscapes, niche natures of the customer needs, and the diminishing proportion of such customers over time according to MoneyGram’s strategic goals.

• The “Value Conversion” concept would make the most sense in context of redeeming reward points for various types of rewards.

Final Thoughts

Despite a MoneyGram loyalty program already existing, many customers were either unaware of the loyalty program or wanting a program that provides more value to the customer. We recommend investing in MoneyGram's loyalty program and finding additional ways to reward the customer and the customer's family for being devoted MoneyGram users.

Across the interviews and survey, there was relatively low interest in a cryptocurrency exchange or cryptocurrency DeFi as an offering. We recommend MoneyGram exploring how cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology can be leveraged to offer customers lower transfer rates, faster transfer times, or other money-transfer-related benefits.

Related to consumer’s financial lives, two key groups of customers emerged from the data: Level 1 and Level 2. This distinction should be considered when developing products and messaging strategies:

• Level 1 customers are less engaged with their country's financial system and less concerned about their own personal finances. MoneyGram has a first-mover advantage as Level 1 customers begin to have more complex financial lives

• Level 2 customers have a more complex financial life and with that comes more concern and need for support. Level 2 has more painpoints MoneyGram could solve compared to Level 1.

Since customers are primarily concerned with supporting their families, MoneyGram should expand its focus to include senders and their families (i.e. receivers) when developing new offerings. Receivers are the most accessible new customers to acquire and family-oriented offerings require the least amount of behavioral change of existing customers.