Mobile Banking App for Migrants

Target audience

The app’s target audience is people who have recently immigrated to the United States, have a job, and regularly send money to their families.

Each year, more than 1 million people come to America to earn a living and financially support their families who remain in their home country. As customers of U.S. banks, these people have special needs and problems. Yet they are not potential bank customers due to the missing or low credit scores.

Until recently, there was no specific banking product that could address and meet the immigrants’ needs. The app we’ve developed is intended to support this sizeable but vulnerable section of society.

Solution overview

After downloading the app, users must sign up and pass the KYC procedure via the Alloy system, providing their social security number, and personal data (e.g., first name, last name, date of birth, phone number, and address). After their identity has been verified via the third-party service Vouched, the user receives a confirmation SMS and sets a password for their account. At this point, a personal virtual card is created and made available for immediate use;  a physical card is created by a banking partner and delivered to the user’s address within a few business days.

Main features

Together with our client, we hosted a few ideation sessions to create a user persona and reflect on the user journey, with an additional session dedicated to design thinking. These sessions allowed us to better understand users’ needs, motives, and pain points, and to come up with ideas for app features that would address them.

• Money transfer

There are two types of transactions available in the app: money transfers to other user accounts and ACH transactions for non-users. We have enabled the app for P2P payments and allowed transfers from other banks’ accounts, so users can top up their app accounts with cards from other banks. Users can also deposit funds into their accounts by visiting a  bank branch in person.

• Family mode

As previously stated, migrants can use the app to send money to their families abroad. With the ‘Family Mode’ feature, users can immediately distribute money to different family members without any fees, as long as they also have accounts in the app.

• Early paycheck

Users can receive wages a few days before payday, by asking their employers to process payroll via the app’s banking partner.

• Microloans

Users can receive microloans from the banking partner — without red tape and unnecessary delays. The app assesses the user’s creditworthiness based on transaction amounts and grants a loan equal to a certain percentage of the sum of the transfer.

• Apple Wallet & Google Pay Integration

​​Immediately after successful registration in the application, the user can add their virtual card created in the app to Apple Pay or Google Pay. This allows the user to pay for their purchases with their card even before they receive it.

Development process

We used the Scrum framework for work on this project. Each iteration lasts three weeks: the first two were spent on implementing the iteration backlog requirements, and the third is used for testing and bug fixing.

At the end of each three-week sprint, we held a demo session to demonstrate the functionality increment to the client, who then install it on iPhones and Android devices for user acceptability testing. Any resulting notes and update requests were given back to us, and we worked to implement them during the subsequent sprint.

Technical Solution Highlights

The app contains multiple integrations with third-party services that create dependencies. Any technical issue on a service provider’s side has the potential to cause a problem beyond our control that may adversely affect the app’s performance. As a result, we have considered different scenarios and developed a fallback plan should such cases occur.

In addition to implementing system event logging and a built-in online chat that enables users to notify the support team about any issues that arise, our team is also setting up monitoring for the uptime of external services. Such surveillance is configured with early warnings (via email and SMS) for an unresponsive service.

Last but not least, Itexus has created a dedicated environment for the pivotal Mbanq service and stable API, so that updated versions are deployed in sync with the newer mobile app versions.

Results & Future Plans

It took us 13 months to deliver the solution to the client. The apps have been PCI DSS certified and released to the app stores.

iOS and Android apps are expected to serve over 30 million migrant users who need a solution designed specifically to fulfill their goals, with the expectation that these users will eventually become the banking partner’s clients over time. Our near-term plans include integrating the check cashing feature, which allows users to deposit checks into their savings accounts online. As for Itexus, we will continue to maintain and provide support for the app, allowing our client to move forward in leaps and bounds.

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