Online Acceptance is where GrabPay is available for use for external partners online. The product was intended to be agnostic to the platform and support both app and web based purchases.
Date: September 2018 - Jan 2020
Platform: Web Application
Locations: Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Philippines
Role: Lead designer
Problem:
Customers want to pay for their purchases on third-party apps and websites, using their GrabPay balance; however, these external merchants had no way of easily providing this capability to their customers.
Solution:
The solution was to roll-out a variety of methods for our partners to integrate with Grab and use:
1) Webview - Partners redirect the checkout flow to a website hosted by Grab and are returned to the partner page after authentication
2) Native SDK - Partners use our mobile/web SDKs to embed the experience in their checkout flow while maintaining consumer security.
3) App redirect - Partners redirect the checkout flow to our consumer app and complete the purchase in the Grab App.
These different methods also needed to support a variety of payment flows and use cases for our partners:
1) One Time Charge - The users authorizes a purchase, it completes or fails - that authorization can not be used again.
2) Tokenization - The users saves GrabPay as a payment method in a partners system. It is available for use at the partner’s discretion.
3) Recurring - The partner uses the user’s Tokenized GrabPay account to facilitate charges against the account without the user issuing a new authorization.
Process & Challenges:
Although we had a plan and knew about the customer need, leadership was extremely skeptical. This resulted in our team not being dedicated to this product. At most, each team member could maybe dedicate about 20% max of our capacity to it.
Online Acceptance had to be flexible and clear enough for any partner to be able to select what integration method(s) fit their needs. The team rolled out integration methods 1 through 3 in order over the course of 1.5 quarters.
My role was to validate the customer need and to determine what to release first based on the customer needs and our vendor needs. Through iterative discovery sprints, I learned that we could quickly add value to vendors who didn't have a payment page but did have a website. We decided to start there and only released a solution that supported GrabPay wallet payments with no top-up capabilities.
I also learned that some of our partnered vendors had development teams and were eager to create their own checkout flows. For those vendors, my product manager and I worked to setup a team of engineers specifically dedicated to create SDKs for these vendors to use. I also partnered with our brand team to ensure we had a design guideline for these vendors to follow so that the checkout flows that contained Grab related artifacts remained consistent across all payment flows. This was the first time anyone at the company did this on the Grab Financial side of the house
To help facilitate quick adoption of our brand guideline, we created an Online Partner Guideline that all partners could use when working with our team. The guideline contained information on the UI components available and their appropriate uses. The strategy on the design side was to limit the number of screens and clicks needed as well as make sure we account for the various integration needs of different partners.
Over the course of the 1.5 quarters, we began to iteratively prove out our concept. Our initial release with just a web payment page and no top-up capabilities surprised our leadership with an average monthly revenue of $18 million/month. Eventually, with improvements and more sales reach, we grew that to $48 million/month. I later found out after leaving Grab that this product kept the company afloat during COVID-19 and was a lifeline for Grab. It feels really good to help contribute to a product that added so much value across the board.