Overview
PAL’s Investment Philosophy is premised on providing all pensionable employees in Nigeria with secure and adequate funds post-retirement, to enable them enjoy a decent standard of living.
The PAL App will be ensuring contributions are preserved and grown to achieve real rate of return in the medium to long term.
I was the main designer working on this new feature in January 2020 with a team of product managers and seven engineers.
The Problem
Giving customers the ability to save for their future in real-time meant making fundamental changes to the way online pension payment have worked since PALPensions App started. Historically, a customer’s earnings would accrue on a monthly basis before automatically transferring from their bank accounts into their pension accounts.
Moving away from an accrued model to pave the way for Instant Transaction required a ground-up rethinking of the way online pension payment are organized and displayed on the Pension app.
Goals
- User : Make contributions whenever they want
- Business : Increase engagement and retention of customers
- Product : Maintain current contributions structure
Research
Determined to make the new contributions feature work the way customers want, we conducted four rounds of user testing with iterations based on feedback — and customer expertise proved crucial as we conducted this testing.
Receiving funds for Pension Contributions can be more complex than it seems. With PALPensions App, customers can add or adjust their contributions for three months, so the listed amount of contributions may fluctuate. Because we want to give customers as much time as possible to add a contributions, we kept the same rollover schedule for contributions: Once the three-month period ends and contributions are totaled, they are deposited on a regular, weekly/monthly basis.
However, we thought it was crucial for customers to access their cumulative contributions immediately, anytime they want.
Complex challenges like this were among several identified during user research sessions, and validating this and other solutions before implementation was key to our turnaround.
“In times like this, when we need a revolutionized system for the Pension industry. I am more than happy to present a modern solution to our customers.”