Client: Bahrain Finance Company

Duration: 3 months

Role: UX and UI Re-Design of the complete application

Industry: Fin-Tech, Banking, Foreign exchange, International money transfer

About The Client

Bahrain Financing Company (BFC) is the leading Money Transfer and Currency Exchange company in the Kingdom of Bahrain. They provide services like sending money overseas, or need foreign currency. BFC has been in the market for over 100 years now specializing in foreign exchange and international money transfer.

Context

Bahrain, officially the Kingdom of Bahrain, is an island country in Western Asia. It is situated on the Persian Gulf and is a GCC country that allows expats to work there and make a living. Of the nearly 650,000 expatriates, approximately 350,000 Indian nationals form the largest expatriate community in Bahrain along with Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Pakistanis, Filipino, Indonesians and Arabs of different nationalities.

There are two types of expats as categorized by the banking sector in Bahrain.

1. Banked Customers (whos salaries are credited to a bank account)
2. Unbanked Customers (whos salaries are given in hand)

The spending habits of banked and unbanked customers are very different. Unbanked customers tend to keep a minimum amount they require with them and send the remaining back to their home country. On the other hand banked customers tend to spend more money within the country.

Recently some waves were made by the Government by establishing a rule that salaries of all employees must be paid through a bank account and in hand payments to be halted. This means that employers now have to start a salary account for all their unbanked employees. But this was not something the banks wanted to proceed with, because:

• Banks incur a cost to maintain their customers.
• Majority of the money is being sent abroad.
• Banks cannot sell their products like credit cards, insurances, stocks etc to these customers.

This is where BFC saw an opportunity to create a solution that solves this problem in the market. Their solution was to use a wallet based salary account for all transactions through their BFC Pay application. Through the app, BFC can sell other products and services like various bill payments, credit card payments etc. They also wanted to bring in banked customers to their platform as well.

In summary, the three major objectives of the BFC Pay mobile app was

1. Act as salary account provider of unbanked customers.
2. Protect customers money, enable them to make payments and send money abroad.