Anchor — Build your
financial services product
Anchor is a banking-as-a-service platform for African businesses to build, embed & launch financial products. It provides the complete infrastructure and tools needed for African businesses to build, embed and launch different features of their Fintech products; for Bank accounts, KYC onboarding, Money Movement, cards and payments. Anchor provides access to this tools for companies to launch innovative financial solutions using its infrastructure services.
At the time i was contacted to work with the Anchor team to help build the webapp for its user, Anchor was making use of APIs for the users to directly interact with its infrastructure, but they wanted to build a webapp for users to visually interact with. This was the priority and main focus of this project.As a Product Designer, I joined forces with another product designer based in Berlin, Germany, to collaborate and work closely with FourthCanvas's Brand team to create their new product in line with the company's new brand identity.
Role
User Interface designer
Company
Anchor
Industry
Fintech — BaaS
Getting Started — Validating the problem
The growth of Fintech in Africa has been immensely great, and for every fintech products, they are mostly run in the backend in partnership with other Financial services providers. These financial providers are some of the major key infrastructures for the fintech features to work. New players in Nigeria's financial scene emerged in 2020, including API fintech startups. Okra, Mono, and similar seeds appear to be on a sure route to success after raising outstanding pre-seed rounds.
They are thought of as the middleman between the parties. How? through the acceptance of messages from the sender, transmission of those messages as requests to the recipient, and data return to the sender. Similar to that, users can ask the broker for information at any moment using API requests.
This is the major key role Anchor is set out by building a financial infrastructure that helps provides these services for Financial institutions.
How we got started — Asking the right questions
Joining the Anchor team in June 2022, Anchor already had their APIs set out. Infact, they already had major partners who were making use of their APIs, partners such as Providus bank, Wema Bank, Pennee, Outpost health and some more. But they had a major problem, their partners wanted tto have more usability for these these APIs in use, they wanted to be able to track all of the transactions each of their users are making and they wanted to be able to do this visually.
Looking at the fact that I needed to understand how this APIs work in the backend for these partners, i had to ask questions and more from the developers that built these APIs to ensure we were building thr right tool for the partners.
Research into the API Market — Taking a deep dive into the use of API in Fintech spaces
Having to dive into research in the API industry, i took a look at current companies providing similar solution for financial startups; such as Paystack, Flutterwave, and Mono. Being able to understand how these companies have been able to provide their solution in their own unique way to startup was very exciting to read about.
I moved on to testing each of this companies i'm making a research about and i realized the importance of every complaince carried out for each startup company and how it was going to influence every of their product features.
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Understanding the importance of the solution
Payment APIs like Stripe were introduced to plug the gaps in the US's core financial infrastructure when they were discovered.
Plaid, a finance firm acquired by Visa, debuted in 2010 after Stripe. Plaid was introduced in 2013 and uses fintech APIs
to link apps with customers' bank accounts.
Although Nigeria took longer, we see a similar pattern with the debut of API finance businesses like Okra in 2019 and
Later Mono.
It doesnt just end with this companies, realizing that the fintech system will keep expanding and we'll keep needing
more companies to keep filling up more space.
Knowing the solution by heart
The next thing i did in my process was to list out every perticular feature available and how each of them linked up to the next. This made me know the product by heart even before starting the design phase. Empathy is a big deal for me when building a product and for every product built, i always try as much as possible to look from the perspective of a user.
This led to me being able to then build a user flow from the this break down of features.
User Flow
To ensure smooth functioning of a complex system involving multiple organization with different permissions, it was important to desgn a user flow that easily provides the partners with that they want to track.
Anchor's design system
Understanding that improving product development efficiency is the main goal of design systems. It is simpler to create products at scale that and are consistent visually, user interface, and user experience when there is an established design language. After i listed out all of the features and understand how they link up to one another, I has to also plan how this featurs will be designed. This was priority because of scalabilty and ensuring to design for the future.
Building the style guide, which includes a color scheme, typography scheme, and spacing scheme, came first. These elements will then affect the components that will be utilized in each of the component.
