Date: September 2018 - January 2020
Platform: React Native (ADR, iOS)
Locations: Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Philippines
Role: Lead designer
Following the airtime top-up launch, GrabPay expanded its services to bill payments, which contributes up to 80% of every household monthly fixed cost. The focus of the feature was to allow Grab Users to check their bill amount and pay it directly via the Grab App, using their GrabPay Balances.
Bill Payment was launched in Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam.
Problem:
In many of the supported countries, especially Indonesia and the Philippines, GrabPay customers must pay their bills manually. In Indonesia it is not unusual for customers to make time in their day to go to the local Indomart and pay their bills directly at the cash register. In the Philippines, many GrabPay customers pay their bills at a local mall’s Bayad Center which is about a 25 minute drive via a 15 peso tuk tuk ride one-way. There they will wait about 15-60 minutes before they are served to pay their bills when they are expected to present the mailed physical bill to the teller for payment.
Solution:
To help customers save time and money, GrabPay provided Bill Payment - the ability to pay bills through the Grab App. The team used an internal Grab service group based in Indonesia to connect with local partners. We on-boarded each partner as a Merchant within Grab and used the existing capabilities from the Merchant team and Settlement teams for operations support and auto settlement.
In addition to paying bills, customers also had their favourite billers saved and later capabilities to apply promotions were incorporated into the product.
Designs and code had to support different partner flows as well as scale to potential partner requirements.
Process:
Before launching in the initial country (ID), the team conducted exploratory research where we spoke to customers on how they currently pay their bills and what challenges they faced while paying them. The team took note on areas of opportunity such as saving biller account information, paying for others, sending receipts to family and friends, saving payment information, and noting that there are also prepayment bills in particular countries like Indonesia. Keeping these areas of opportunity in mind, I designed a short flow that could scale and support these requirements from a design perspective. Before launching in each subsequent country, we would then use the baseline flow from Indonesia to usability test the experience and also learn about bill payment in the local countries. What we learned was that each country at its crux had forms of bill payment whether digital or manual, but also each country had its own challenges. Countries where our bill payment flow would have the highest impact of value appeared to be in countries where transiting played a large portion of people’s time in the day.