THE PROBLEM

Scotiabank customers often calls in because they have trouble identifying transactions that they’ve made.

In fact, transaction detail inquiry is one of the top 12 call centre drivers, accumulating high operating costs and an average sum of 600 minutes annually. Although transactions are available in the app, very few details are displayed. In addition, the way that some transaction names are shown makes it difficult for an average customer to understand.

The investigation

01 — What are customers asking for?
Call Centre data shows that the top things being asked for are transaction name, time, and location. Customers want to know what they had spent money on.

02 — Our engineering capabilities
One of the most important part of the project is to understand how much enhancement we make on the back end system — how much data can we clean up? What kind of data do we have access to?

03 — Current landscape and inspirations
Although top Canadian banks are only displaying basic transaction info, international tech and finance companies are steps ahead, showing merchant info and locations, isights, and digital receipts.

04 — Impacts to existing experiences
Credit card transactions are not the first transaction details to appear in the app and while we’re bringing more info to credit card transactions, transactions in other types of account will remain the same. In the areas where we do break consistency, we need to do it with intent and clarity.

THE IDEATION

Going wide before narrow

Even though we’re only tackling a specific type of transactions, in order to make sure that we are designing a solution that is scalable and has longevity, we need to understand how it’ll fit into the current as well as the near-future system. As the tech investigation required some time, I started brainstorming on what a user may find useful when looking at their transactions.

With all the info that I’ve collected, I started putting together a basic structure for the transaction details page. The layout takes into account scalability for accessibility, additional info that will be added in the future, and reusability across experiences.

NAVIGATING AROUND CONSTRAINTS

After a few months of investigation on the engineering side, we received some bad news.

Working with basic data

We started with a lot of ideas for the data that we could potentially show, however, the tech investigation revealed that we had very little to work with. The transaction name and description clean up were highly inaccurate, and we couldn’t afford to display misinformation. To solution for that, we de-scoped the MVP to displaying only basic transaction info and would look into partnering with a vendor for the capabilities we had in mind.

No illustration support

The original idea consisted of unique illustrations for each type of transaction. Though decorative, the use of illustration would bring value in the form of delight to the otherwise clinical designs that we currently have. Unfortunately, due to project timelines, the illustration team couldn’t help us with this task. Instead, I offered to create the illustrations myself and get it reviewed by them. I also had to decrease the scope to having one illustration with multiple colour variations so that the work was manageable.

THE MVP

Delivering the basics first

The first iteration of transaction details that we’ve launched for credit cards included:

• Transaction name

• Transaction details

• Date of when transaction was made and the posted date

• From / to accounts

• Transaction type (Top 15)

• Reward category

Near-future enhancements included:

• Partnering up with 3rd party vendors to improve data clean up and access to more data such as merchant info and logo

• Category customization and memo creation

• Quick access to existing features such as installment lending and save to phone

• Extending transaction details to the rest of the banking accounts

• Unique illustrations for every type of transaction

• Highlighting rewards by surfacing reward points gained and point multipliers

• Contextual information such as category overspend and unusual spending

Blue-sky ideas included:

• Easy access to brand new features such as bill split and dispute at transaction level

• Direct to 3rd parties for more info so users can further identify transaction (ex. link to Airbnb to view details of the booked place)

• Digital receipts to lessen environmental waste and allow easier tracking via search