Problem

Factorial released its own expense management solution MVP back in April 2022. The step that followed through (until June 2023) were allowing employees submit expense claims through Factorial Cards, for which several goals needed to be accomplished, as described below.

Goals

The ultimate goal was to provide an easier solution for employees to report their company expenses, while adding business revenue by capturing a percentage of each transaction. For this, smaller goals needed to be accomplished:

Phase 1

1. Designing a custom branding for Factorial Cards.

2. Improving the existing onboarding (KYC) for customers to increase conversion.

3. Launching virtual cards for online purchases and payments of subscriptions.

👇 Described in this article

Phase 2

1. Designing the interface for Cards on the mobile app.

2. Launching Factorial Cards on Digital Wallets (Apple and Google Pay).

🔗 Contact for a full breakdown of details →

Branding for Factorial Cards

I took into account several things:

• The physical card only could be either white or black (because of the provider).

• Color code for virtual and single-use cards was based on Factorial branding (initially worked out by the Branding team).

I benchmarked competitors such as Spendesk, N26, Revolut Business… and the key takeaways were:

• A simple yet elegant design.

• Creating a color code for each purpose, so as to let users create a mental model when using their cards (radical red for virtual cards, viridian for single-use cards, and white for physical cards).

• We wanted to position virtual cards as the top-choice by users (they didn't have any impact on costs, and they could be used right away with no shipping). The rationale behind using radical red (the main color of the Factorial branding) for virtual cards was that red attracts the most attention and is associated with strong emotions, such as love, and passion. It's the universal color to signify strength, power, and courage.

Onboarding Page for Users

The main hypothesis was that the onboarding page was not prescriptive enough for users to understand several key aspects, such as:

• The onboarding page didn't show a clear value proposition.

• It didn't offer support.

• It didn't highlight the key benefits of creating an account and using cards to report employee expenses.

• It missed guidance for users:

  • How the account worked.

  • How Factorial Cards worked.

  • What were the costs of using Factorial Cards.

The key takeaway was that design wasn't generating engagement.

— Qualitative research

We interviewed a set of customers to false this hypothesis and we could validate that, indeed, all the points stated above were shared by our customers.

When taking a look at the existing onboarding page (before improvements), it looked like this:

In order to validate the previous hypothesis and understand what was really happening, I jumped into interviewing a small group of customers that were using Factorial but had dropped when creating their cards account. I decided to go with a set of open questions similar to the following, to try avoid biased answers:

Rapport

• We've seen you recently started creating an Expenses Wallet account.

Build

• How did you find the process?

Peak

• Was there any information you were missing?

• Did you find any obstacles?

Open feedback

• Were you to take on the process again, what would you change?

• From 1 to 5, how would you rate the overall experience? (1 being Too bad and 5 being Excelent?

— Quantitative research

We launched the Factorial Cards MVP in April 2022. Since then, 5 months had passed and we had barely saw conversion. Only physical cards could be used up to that moment. We had a total of 76 cards created, from 119 companies.

When taking a look at the funnel conversion, it looked like this:

— Debriefing and Key Learnings

After conducting interviews I noticed customers answered in similar ways and had common painpoints, which matched with our initial hypotheses.

Among these painpoints, I found that nearly every customer had experienced the following:

• What is it → They wanted to know what the process of creating an account consisted on, and why they needed it.

• Cost → They wanted to know how much it was going to cost them to use Factorial Cards.

• Transaction fees → They wanted to know any implicit fees when paying with Factorial Cards, such as Exchange rate, Payments outside EU…

• Key benefits → They wondered what the ultimate goal of using Factorial Cards was, specially in cases where they were already using Bank Cards.

• Effort → They wanted to know how long it was going to take to create an account. They were also worried about the learning curve in cases where they were already using another software to report expenses.

Assets for the Onboarding Page

I designed the assets for the onboarding page. The idea was to design the most attractive piece of design, since it's what the user would see in the first place, with some interactions. For example, when hovering on the front element, there would be a tilt effect that followed the movement of the cursor.

Final Design for Onboarding Page

I designed a modular landing page that could be reused in other products that also required onboarding to use cards (like SaaS management through virtual cards). Thus, the onboarding page kept all same sections to describe the process, but the hero changed:

• When triggered from the Expenses menu, the hero would display a point of sale with a card, generating an expense.

• When triggered from the Software menu, the hero would display a virtual card managing software subscriptions.

• When triggered from the Cards menu, the hero would display a stack of cards.

• Some sections could be dispensed with or shown, based on the use case.

  
  

Want to know more about Phase 2?

• Designing the interface for Cards on the mobile app.

• Launching Factorial Cards on Digital Wallets (Apple and Google Pay).

🔗 Contact for a full breakdown of details →