VISA & HSBC

AI Loyalty App

Rapid Functional Mobile App Prototype Design and Development for VISA & HSBC and Their iOS and Android Cog-X Experience That Rewards Users for Green Spending.

Summary

Antiblanks Were Approached by VISA to Deliver a Prototype Mobile Application Called VISA Green - An AI Powered Mobile App Which Tracks and Rewards It’s Users Based on How Green They Purchase Every Day Services and Products.

Antiblanks were approached by VISA to deliver a prototype mobile application called VISA Green - An AI powered mobile app which tracks and rewards it’s users based on how green they purchase every day services and products.

The prototype would be unveiled at the CogX festival in London. The CogX festival is a festival of all things AI and emerging technologies in machine learning, deep learning and what’s coming next in the world of technology.

The product had a number of highly technical challenges such as the complexity and size of the transactional data. There was little margin for error. Using design thinking, our team of experts ran a number of ideation workshops and adopted an iterative/agile development approach to bring the prototype to life in less than six weeks.

Backstory

Antiblanks Directors Dan Ivanovic and Mark Kneale Have an Existing Business Relationship With VISA Which Started in 2018 When Antiblanks Were Recommended to VISA as a Mobile Development Partner to Take Ownership of Visa’s Existing VISA Travel Tools Application Which Needed Some Urgent Maintenance.

When VISA were presented with the time sensitive brief to deliver the VISA Green App prototype, they looked for a mobile development partner that was capable of achieving this and contacted Antiblanks knowing from past experience that Dan & Mark’s team were highly technical and could be trusted with such a high risk project.

Problem

The Challenge Was to Develop a Complex Prototype in Only Six Weeks That Would Include Enough Functionality to Demonstrate Visa’s Product Vision of Rewarding Users for Greener Spending and for the App to Be Polished Enough to Promote the VISA & HSBC Brands. The Challenges Could Be Grouped Into Four Main Areas:

1. Time constraints

There was a lot to achieve both creatively and technically in a very short amount of time. Being that the sole purpose of the app was for it to be used as a promotional piece at the CogX festival there was no flexibility with regard to the deadline.

2. Tough crowd

CogX is a festival of emerging tech and Artificial Intelligence (AI), the standard of products being promoted would be very high and the audience would be technically minded and hard to impress.

3. Third party dependency

The data to drive the app would be delivered by VISA’s data scientists. The algorithms used to provide the data were incomplete and there was no signature defined for how the shape of this data would look.

4. Cross platform compatibility

VISA were unsure whether they would be previewing the app at CogX on iOS, Android or both platforms.

Solution

Antiblanks and VISA Worked Closely Together to Formulate a Plan That Would Allow Us to Iteratively Deliver App Release Candidates and Minimise Risk of Failure to Deliver a Finished Product.

1. Good project management

Antiblanks and VISA held a one day ideation workshop to kick off the project, establish requirements, identify the potential risks and set clear project goals to form a roadmap to ensure we would stay on track and meet our tight deadline. We designed a scrum based process to work in two sprints to meet three deliverables. We involved key stakeholders from the outset and aimed to deliver small and regular releases. We used a lightweight and fitting suite of tools including Trello, Google Drive and Slack to allow us to manage our time, collaborate and communicate effectively.

2. Multi disciplined team

We identified the required skills from the outset and formed a team of the right size and with the right mix of disciplines. Our team comprising of a product owner, project manager, user experience lead, design lead, technical lead, gamification expert, data scientist and a senior developer, allowed us to be agile and deliver a product that was visually and technically on point for its audience.

3. Good technical leadership

Our decision to use React Native, a mature and familiar framework for building cross platform native mobile apps that can export to both iOS and Android near halved our work to deliver both applications. We leveraged our in-house prototype framework to speed development, and adopted an iterative and progressive release strategy which enabled us to release fallback versions of the app which de-risked us from meeting our deadline. Finally we adopted a unit test strategy which didn’t greatly impact speed of delivery but heavily reduced bugs and the time required for manual quality assurance.

The Outcome

We Delivered a Visually Outstanding, Highly Performant and Bug Free Application Which Contained All Specified Features Plus More in Good Time for VISA & HSBC To Demo at CogX. Our Prototype Was Well Received by VISA & HSBC and Immediate Steps Were Taken for Us to Further Development of the App From Prototype to a Production Version.

Seamless prototype

On time

More features

On budget

“We really like the prototype and have been showing it proudly to our partners.”

- The VISA team.

Reflection

Overall This Was a Hugely Successful Project So It’s Hard to Find Fault. We Collaborated Well With Visa’s Team, We Over-Delivered and Were Under Budget and at No Point During the Process Did We Feel Anything Other Than in Complete Control.

The project is now moving onto phase 2 where we will look to implement a rewards specific Blackchain which will enable a more efficient and more flexible way to run the rewards engine.

In addition to this we will create a behavioural framework which will enable us to understand and value user behaviour based on tracking and analysing thousands of data points.

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