Strategic design of a business to business marketplace

Site location
Global

Year
2018

Building remote trust among small and medium businesses, within the best global banking app.

Challenge
We needed to strategically explore the opportunity of building a new marketplace to serve the existing small and medium client segment of one of the largest global banks.

Insight
There is a desire to make business online but trust issues keep small and medium entrepreneurs hesitant to do so. Although digital transactions are the norm now, when it comes to making business overseas, with other businesses they don't know, they need to have extra care.

Solution
Design a platform to be positioned in the market as a secure and trusted space that includes blockchain technology not only to find the right opportunities but also, and more importantly to close those deals online without the need of external players. We designed a marketplace that would include not only the bank's clients but also other external business so that the business opportunity is larger and not limited to existing clients. This would benefit not only our clients but also our own bank business.

Bank clients would benefit from premium features and top connections within the platform so that they perceived the premiumness of belonging to our bank and other banks platform users would be enticed (but not obliged to) join us as clients as well.

Users would connect and chat with other businesses, discuss opportunities within, negotiate, have access to financing suppong, law experts, business support, and a secure transaction platform that would build trust and reduce digital risk. The bank and its technology solutions would provide legitimacy and act as guarantee.

Also, users would be able to rate, read and comment on each other openly within their profiles so that they get to know each other, have a better idea of who they are doing business with, and overall construct a business community that is transparent, accessible and trustworthy.

Process
We needed to align teams in Mexico, Peru, Turkey, Colombia and Spain so we designed a 3 day working session in Mexico D.F. with all the bank existing user knowledge from previous research in order to conceptualize a solution to be tested together with all hypotheses originated.

We designed a user-centric process to ensure small and medium business needs were at the center of our thinking. The sessions were a success, formulating a clear vision and our first high level prototype for the marketplace, including a technological architecture. It also helped remote teams to get to know each other and work closely towards a shared vision.

Once back in Spain, we tested the solution with users as well as some potential business models to ensure viability.