Debit cards for Oyster Financial
Launching a disruptive product for SMEs in Mexico
Oyster Financial, a startup servicing SMEs and Independent professionals lately became one of the most promising neobanks in Mexico after starting operations in Q1 2019. Being one of the founding employees was crucial to get hands on early core aspects of the ecosystem such as the first Oyster debit cards experience. The project, which started as a collaboration with a studio in California, landed completely into the hands of the Oyster Design Team where I was commissioned to participate during the entire design process.
During the process, my participation covered five main stages:
The scope required the team to engage with Oyster customers by providing two sets of payment methods: digital cards for online purchases and physical EMV cards for card present transactions.
The journey kicked off analyzing other great players on the scene. One of the first tasks I dived in was to test and get accounts of the most recognized neobanks and financial institutions in the scene by registering, topping up accounts, getting support and using their cards after ordering them. In addition, I also observed how users onboarded and ordered or replaced cards and talked about their preferences. An early user research led me to map a customer journey, which then ran in parallel with visual explorations and prototyping.
The interactions I designed aimed to be fluid and conversational, promoting the concept of smart spending with purpose-driven cards. The components designed to match the Oyster Design System, where I also participated designing taught me how to master Figma's shared libraries. I also animated the success and error screens screens using After Effects and Lottie. For all of the prototypes and transitions I used ProtoPie.
Mockups I modeled and rendered to represent the card. I used Rhinoceros 3D software and Keyshot for rendering. Later I used Photoshop for lighting adjustments and color corrections. I made several PSD files so anyone in the organization could drag and drop to visualize cards in a realistic view.
"Manu, you're also an Industrial Designer, why don't you take care of the card manufacturing process?"
That's something the Head of Design told me once. Then I jumped into the development of manufacturing specifications, explored the nuances of regulations and compliance, and convinced our finance team to allow enough budget to get our cards with contactless antennas.
I even visited the factory for QA of the actual PVC cards. Later, when we got our first batch, I convinced the CEO, managers, and backend engineers to run unit testing to validate that cards worked on both: EMV chip and contactless transactions.
The mentioned challenges required coordination across diverse business areas such as compliance, finance, engineering, and marketing operations.
For the launch, we wanted to make something special. Pandemic made us work on a social media launch video where I also led art direction, planning, and even shooting.
The communications team decided to tell the story of three entrepreneurs by framing their workspace and the evolution of their business over time.
The concept was to state that while other financial institutions products for businesses seems aspirational and are unlocked after financial success, Oyster is the bank that help small business owners since the very beginning. I then drew several storyboards and made different moodboards that helped the production team to plan the shooting.
My contributions made possible the launch of Oyster cards thanks to my multi-disciplinary approach and diverse backgrounds. After a year operating over a flat acquisition rate, cards launch doubled Oyster's customer acquisition during the first two months of activity. Acquisition also boosted value of transactions and trust among customers, getting Oyster's highest scores in customer satisfaction indicators.