Name: Transforming How 12M South Africans Bank
Uploaded: 2026-08-19T07:06:12.585Z
Duration: 20 min 8 s
Description: Transforming How 12M South Africans Bank

Transcript for "Transforming How 12M South Africans Bank": I've just been told that I have to dance. I'm gonna disappoint you. I'm saying I'm not gonna dance. But good afternoon, you lovely people. Thank you for the warm welcome to Jen and the mixed panel team. I am here today to talk about a a project, but, it's not my slide. A project that I've been living for the last six months. I was talking to Serene and Gwen there from our team trying to discuss what what could we talk about and link to Mixpanel. And I thought best just to talk to a lived experience that that's brought together our whole organization across products, across engineering, marketing, the business teams, our data teams, of course, as well. So the next twenty minutes, I'll just tell you how we did it, what mistakes we've made, what we've learned, and, of course, how we've used Mixpanel along the way in case that helps anyone in the room. It was called how, transforming how 12,000,000 South Africans bank. This morning, I checked the reports and we're up to 13. So cool. Okay. Me. That's an old photo. I look like this now. Grey hairs, stress. I head I head up our product team at GoTime. I'll explain who GoTime are in a second. I've been with the company for the last five years, which is pretty much the whole life cycle of our partnership with with Mixpanel, so from the early days. I'm a consultant by trade, which I'm not proud of. Did that for about ten years across the world in Hong Kong, London, and now I now live in in Singapore. So come say hi. You see me around. Okay. So here we go time. This is probably the hardest slide that I've got to explain for the whole session. We we don't make sense as a group. We are a digital banking group, as we call ourselves. We have two licensed banks. One is in The Philippines, and that's GoTime, that we launched, in 2022. And then our original bank is in South Africa. That's, it was originally called Time Bank. As you can see here, over my shoulder, we're now called GoTime, and that's what I'm here to talk about today. We want to target emerging markets. We believe, very thoroughly that the digital banking is the way to increase access to banking services, whether that's transactional or lending. We're also moving into the the small business space as well because that is transformative for the lives of people in countries where, you know, whether it's through bad regulation or currencies that aren't stable, or just access to to services, whether it's through branches or online. That's what we live for and that's the philosophy that runs through our our company today. And we believe there's a there's a big enough market in the world to do that. We have four pillars that that kinda drive our proposition to market. We are first and foremost digital, which is why I'm standing here today. We have apps. We've also got a a kiosk model. So this thing on the right hand side here is, a physical footprint for us. So without having it looks at the revolutes of the world or, you know, wide companies like that purely online. We have these, kiosks that sit within retail stores in our target country. So if someone is going to go, into one of these these stores to get the shopping, they'll be accosted by an ambassador who is managing one of these kiosks. They can open an account, get biometrally verified, and get a debit card on the spot that they can then go and use in the account. And that's that's key really for the the story that I'll tell soon because that drives our acquisition, and we cannot lose that. K. How do we work with Mixpanel? So like most people in the room here as unlearning, it's a a product and a data driven, sort of, from a team point of view, partnership that we have. We use it across, product level. So in terms of actual funnel analytics for all of our customer journeys, across both the app and the kiosk, we do customer sentiment tracking as well. So we we now manage NPS product scoring, via mixed panel dashboards as well. We're just about getting into experimentation. I'm a little bit ashamed to say, we're not at the curve on that yet, but that's, we've just started this year, I would say, and that's that's partly due to the fact that we've had to replatform everything. This is it's one of our data tools. It drives our decisions, like, undoubtedly. So, whether it's, you know, understanding what devices customers are using, are we gonna, you know, are they gonna drop offs if, if we launch a new version of the app that they can't use, right the way through to some of the topics that I think Randy was talking about this morning in terms of drop offs in the actual individual customer journeys. We're using Mixpanel day in day out to do that. K. So relaunching South Africa. The bank was launched seven years ago in a very rushed manner. So there was a a platform that they had to get off from a legacy owner. It was built with a team of probably eight development teams. We relaunched the bank there. Since then, thanks to, you know, success in terms of scaling, I would say funding that we've got as well, The the launch of the Philippines entity as well is kinda like the blueprint for how we can evolve into the future for our group. We felt that about eighteen months ago, it was the time to level up South Africa. And that would mean a ground up rebuild. So we are now passing ourselves as a as a global brand, even though we're in the two countries. We wanted to relaunch South Africa on the the new GoTime brand, partly to kind of like change the customer base that we have. So make banking accessible but feel more premium with the message that we were sending to the market. And we believe that if you can get the pricing right, you can get the customer experience right, banking doesn't have to be prohibitive. It can still be beautiful banking for everyone, not just a premium experience for rich people. So we had at the time 12,000,000 customers who had onboarded to this product. Not all active, obviously. You know, we see dormancy. We see account drop offs. A way to try and reactivate as well as attract new customers was effectively the business challenge that we had, as well as repositioning us, as a global player. So the challenges that we had to that we faced in doing so so it's a new and unfamiliar brand. There was a lot of customer inertia, and we're still seeing that now. Internally, we believe that the way that we had could kind of evolve the business was was to not think of this as just it's not just a reskin. So if you talk to, you know, some of the business leads, for example, they're like, oh, cool. We're getting a new app. It's different colors. Nice one. This is actually about, you know, full stack rebuilding, looking at how we re, reintegrate our data platforms, look about how we reintegrate all the event tracking and instrumentation that we have as well, and rebuilding the the muscle for what actually looks like, you know, good journeys, good sort of customer experience, recovery flows, all those kinds of things as well, so that we can get a good quality of experience and therefore quality of customer as well. He's under immense pressure to do this, sort of leading the product team. This is our our bank CEO in South Africa, Cheslin. He is his middle name is Grit. He is he wakes up and just chews people and chews projects, and he's like, we gotta get this done. So he set us the challenge that we've gotta try and minimize customer churn in doing this project. The worst case scenario, he made this up as 10% churn. I think it it could be even bigger than that. So with that in mind, we're trying to work out what do we do next. So what I've got here is this is the from left to right, this is our existing apps today. We got Android, iOS. Bad decision to do two separate apps. If anyone's learning from that, take that one from me. So the right hand side here is effectively the the new experience that we launched in May this year. So it's live in the market now. As I sort of touched upon earlier, everything on the screens here, you know, the the depths and the back end services, all the, you know, everything that fits behind here is completely new. Okay? So replatforming, relaunch, everything. So how do we do it, and where does Mixpanel come into play? Okay. So there's there's two elements that we kind of stood up the team to focus on. The first is the pull. So how do we attract customers from using the existing apps onto the new platform and make sure they're incentivized to do so. Not just incentivized in terms of monetary, but incentivized in terms of, like, okay, this is a good idea. I wanna do this because I enjoy the experience. And the other side of it was the push. So we're about the phase where we're gonna start pushing customers next month. So I'll let you know how that goes if I come back next year. Who knows? So we're in this phase at the moment in terms of how do we make sure customers want to go onto the new app. So that's existing customers today as well as the, new people who might sign up as well. We basically we we got a team together across the multidisciplinary. So we had products, engineering, marketing, business, etcetera. And we the first thing we did was a a big exercise on cohort analysis. So who uses the features today? How do they use them on the existing app? Who are the high value customers? And we learned through the analytics that we had from our data team plus, the product teams getting their hands dirty in mixed panel as well, just to understand that we actually do operate on a Pareto rule. Okay? So I think someone here mentioned it earlier today, but the super users, the 20% base of customers who drive 80% of our activity, we're gonna be our target audience to begin with. And then after that, we kinda derived a set of cohorts that we're still sort of updating every week, to to make sure from a scientific point of view, we can start to pull people over and really experiment with, the customer bases that we try and get onto the new app, whether that's through sort of CLM targeted marketing, or sort of above the line marketing as well just to see if we can change the message to try and get to these right segments or not. The other area that kind of was part of the pull, experience was on new features as well. There were gaps that we knew were missing in our existing proposition. And through looking at, a lot of sort of social media listening and talking to customers in the market, talking to our ambassador networks as a physical interaction point with customers. We were able to build a road map that kinda like would package up with all the CLM work that we did in the cohort targeting to make sure we were hitting people with the right product offerings as well. So if for example, we've got a a cohort of customers who are the they're effectively hustlers. They're small business users. They're using this retail account as their business account. So we sort of looked at their behaviors, what do they do around payday, what do they do around, you know, deposits and cash taking, and then we built out strategies to try and target those people to pull them across as well. And we also sort of targeted them when we had new features such as, you know, a second or third account so they could then purposely use that account for their business. Okay? So it's all packaging up together. We also did a lot of benchmarking. So this is obviously the internal exercise. I can't tell you how many iterations of the dashboards we built, but effectively looking at like for like side by side views of old app compared to new app. So whether that's feature reduction level, whether it's customer cohort level that we were looking at. We also looked at, obviously, activity rates across on the aggregate level as well just to see, are we killing activity? So to the point earlier about the 10% churn, are customers moving to the new app? Are they staying there, or are they going back to the other app? So if you can imagine, we've effectively got, you know, two platforms, two sets of dashboards and reports, and we're having to do the over the oversight analysis to try and understand, is it working in terms of churn and migration across or not? It was quite fun. The push experience, is is basically trying to convince these people now that the old experience sucks. Wasn't too hard. So this is the bit that we're going into now. We're effectively on the back of what we learned today from the, the migration pull activities. We're now ramping up the the the custom life cycle management comms, etcetera, to to tell customers that they have to move across now. So we're expecting to see a bit of a an uptick as we get aggressive with that, but we need to be conscious that we're not, contributing to any customer churn in doing so. We're also introducing targeted friction by which is is quite quite bluntly. It's switching things off in the app. So using the feature toggles and platforms that we've got in the back end, bringing experiences that add friction to if customers want to check on and send, you know, add to a savings account. We're gradually gonna migrate down in in terms of feature parity within the two apps as well. And, of course, that will play massively into how we do the analytics to understand, does this work or not? Because there's a very strong risk that in doing that, we're just gonna piss people off. So you turn something off, they're like, okay. I'm going to another bank where I can get this rather than having to download a new app for us, which they don't recognize. K. I'll just talk a little bit around some of the, I guess, the challenges that we had and be quite specific on how mixed panel supported us, in in analyzing those challenges and trying to find a way to resolve. We did find products and funnel issues. So in redesigning, replatforming, we, you know, we got creative. We redesigned some journeys. We've learned a lot of you know, in some cases they work, in some cases they don't. I'll take an example where on our origination funnel, so account opening funnel, we moved the marketing consent to one more page. We literally moved it two pages down in terms of the origination journey, and we saw an 80% drop in marketing acceptance. So our CMO, Danny, why have you done this? You know, you're killing us. So we had to switch it back. Again, as you can imagine, dashboards origination, where are the drop offs, root cause analysis? Let's go fix it. The other road bumps were early feedback and sentiment. So I would love to have shown you the the dashboard, but we've got these these sentiment dashboards that we use. And we were tracking these every week, you know, big huddle every single Thursday, getting around it, what's happening, what are people saying, social media online, in the app, app store ratings, etcetera. This was all consolidated. Again, mostly a mixed panel, and we were looking at what customers feel when they're doing this and trying to understand why. The early feedback was it was not strong. So even though we were targeting what we thought were our our super users, the truth was we were getting a much smaller set of that cohort. So, again, iterate, revise the strategy, find new ways to get to these people, track the sentiment, see what happens. So when I said earlier we don't do experiment, I was more thinking along in terms of, like, in line experimentation on the front end experience. But in terms of approaches to get customers to migrate, this is where it's really powerful for us to, kinda analyze and and resolve these things. We also, you know, the road bumps just to pick up on the the product offering. So so learning about feature gaps was important to us as well. So even though the data was telling us that there is you know, these customers operate on these types of products, we didn't quite understand the adjacency of the product. So if you are, for example, a a customer who who draws out cash every month, we didn't necessarily make the connection between, what bill payments you were making, that kind of thing. So we offered those. We start to sort of ease these things together, and then we realized, okay, Roadmap needs to adapt again to offer more online bill payers, for example, by tracking what these customers are doing off the app as well where possible. And then finally, we just had to kind of fight a lot of competitor noise as well. So our our sort of tagline of saying this is not just a reskin. We we've been attacked by some subtly by some of the competition as well talking about how, you know, beautiful banking doesn't mean a solid experience. So, I mean, it's not really related to the data. It just pisses me off. So I wanted to put on the screen here just to to vent everyone today. Yeah. That's been one of the road bumps as well. K. So how's it going? So the target was it was 12,000,000 customers including reactivations, including bringing across the active users. We're pleased to say it's going it's going okay. So we are three months now from go live. As you can see, we've we've ramped up the marketing. This is this is not AI. This is actually what people in Johannesburg and Cape Town see, when they're driving to work every morning. We we hit the million downloads last month, which was pretty cool and we were rated as the number one app in the country. So, I I I say this sincerely, we would not be able to do this without using data at the source of how we made the decisions and how we redesigned and launched the products as well. Having done I think I've done three bank launches now. When you launch these things, you know, most of the time your opinion is the data. So you don't you have maybe some generative stuff that you've gone, you've gone to market, you've got some customer insights, you go, cool. Let's try it. This was different and quite special because we have the science behind it to actually look at these human beings, what they do, behaviors are, and sort of progressively roll this thing out. So you the kind of the signals that you get and the telemetry that comes out of the platforms to do this has just made a completely different experience to any, like, product launch that I've done before, which is very cool. I found it. There you go. Okay. So for example, this is one of our sentiment dashboards. This is an early iteration of it. So we're now tracking in app NPS. We've also got in line, product journey scoring as well. So after you complete a bill payment and you're enjoying your experience, stuff that you've seen on millions of apps, we're using this stuff. It's actually very useful for us. And the big one here is looking at finding out who these people are because word-of-mouth is so important in this industry, and doing targeted campaigns to see if we can resolve and revive detractors. Okay. Okay. This is just an image to finish. I think I'm a bit ahead of time, but this is effectively that from our launch day, you'll see that, this is from Twitter. We became the trending number one trending app in South Africa very briefly above this guy, Drake, which is cool. We were bigger than China at one stage as well. I originally had a picture of Xi Jinping here, but I took it out because I realized I might not be able to travel around Asia if I did so. But that's just the the last thing sort of shot I wanted to share with you all. I hope you found this useful. Thank you very much.