<aside> ⌛ TIME: 1. Building the base: December 2018 2. Adding Enhancements: Jan - Jun 2019

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<aside> 👔 Stakeholders: 2 PM's, 1 PMM, 3 Designers, 2 FE , 4 BE, 1 QA

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<aside> 📝 Role: Product Thinking, User Research, Design Exploration and Implementation

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Understanding the problem**: Origins**

October 2018:

Even though the world of tech and moved ahead by leaps and bounds, our banking experiences are terrible, primarily because it rests on legacy systems, conservative stakeholders and not enough tech experts to lead this front. This buggy experience is even more amplified when you have to perform a lot of banking operations as a business. The friction to bank is too high with the multiple layers of security, and doesn't look at banking as a product but a service.

Razorpay wanted to solve this.

Razorpay had realized that merchants consistently looked for solutions that will allow them to disburse money with ease, just as they could accept money for their business via various methods.

To be the "One stop Financial Hub for Businesses", Razorpay needed to provide solutions in not just payout disbursal, but also finance management and making sure business always have working captial. Welcome to the vision of building a neo-bank , **RazorpayX!**

But what exactly is a neo-bank? A Neo-bank is a bank with no physical branches.

🧗 The catch here is that in India, you need a banking license to operate, which can take a long time and hence we partner with a bank to carry out any banking functions like transaction.

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/3d8563dc-922b-4fa8-a9eb-c72fc196bead/Explaining_Layers.png

In this project, I want to talk about the early days of RazorpayX when we were figuring out what to build, some project planning techniques that helped us build an MVP in 45 days of WarRoom, as well as showcase some interactions we created, in an attempt to break the mould.

What was the MVP?

In the first phase of the neobank, we were primarily looking to solve for the following problems:

<aside> 🔗 Provide API banking to users who want to automate their payout disbursal, specially in businesses where money to the end customer is part of the business plan as in industries like Gaming (Rewards) , Lending.

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<aside> 🏦 Replace the current account experience by creating a banking layer on top of banks. It should include opening an account, contact creation and disbursal of payouts. Eventually, we will also add bulk creation of contacts and payouts, followed by applications.

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We decided to build a platform that allows users to:

  1. 📝 Sign Up and fill KYC (Compliance)
  2. 💰Load Money into a Virtual Account
  3. 👯‍♀️ Create a Contact
  4. 💸 Send Payout