Identify 3 to 5 issues on a collaborative group lending and savings platform.

Question

Identify 3 to 5 issues on a collaborative group lending and savings platform.

MoneyFellows is a collaborative group lending and savings platform. It is a trusted and more convenient way
of finding and managing Money Circles (Gam’eya) online by digitizing the informal traditional offline ROSCA
(Rotating Savings and Credit Association) model.
MoneyFellows combines saving and credit by establishing money circles of which:
- Based on a user’s score they can search and find a suitable money circle to join.
- Once the money circle starts, all users then pay a similar monthly installment for a defined number of months.
- Each month, one of the circle members receives the total money paid by everyone else until all members have received their payouts.
MoneyFellows utilizes technology to help people find trusted, more convenient money circles, easily track and automate payments while building up user’s MoneyFellows score.
The beauty of having a digitized money circle platform is the continuous availability of slots that meets everyone’s needs (either looking to save or in need of urgent money).
Main Features:
- Flexible payment options (Salary deductions - Credit Card – Cash collection - etc ..).
- Fixed Pay-out date for all users, no delays.
- 100% Trusted money circles (Never worry, if someone stops paying, MoneyFellows will replace his slot).
- Extra benefits for employees of our corporate partners.
- A smart scoring system that allows users to keep building up his/her score to unlock higher payouts and earlier slots.

To do:
- Identify 3-5 issues that you can find on the app.
- Priorities them and choose which problem you will tackle first.
- Since you don’t have enough data you can use assumptions to identify & solve this issue
- Present your findings and how you came up with the solution.

Asked at Sofi over a year ago

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PM Team · Answer 1 · 2020-03-01T01:53:26+0000

It is difficult to answer this question without much knowledge of the business. I had to do some research into this app before I can answer this question.

I do find the business model very interesting and hope there are managing the risk/non-payments well.

One of the clarifications we should ask is:

Is the goal to find the issue with the business model of (Rotating Savings and Credit Association) model (OR)\
Do we need to find the issues with the app itself? I believe this will be difficult unless we have played with the app.

Now moving to provide some structure to the problem -

What is the goal of the product?

The goal of the product is for connecting users so that money can be saved and be used when urgently needed.

What problems does the product face?

Business problem(s):

1.) How is the risk mitigated when the user does not pay? how do we prevent defaults or non-payments
2.) Do we need to increase the user engagement? how can we sell this to model to markets where this is not much education on this model?
3.) Model used to calculate the credit worthiness.

App problems(s)

Make the circles bigger? How can we allow users to save more money?
Users not being able to join due to verification issues. (biggest complaint on google play store)
Ensuring users with clarity on their saving and forecasting their payouts.

How would you solve the problem?

I would like to hear from more users on how we can solve the business problms stated above. However, I will take shot at addressing the app issues.

1. Making the circles bigger -
Making the circles bigger would mean that there is more risk to some slots for non-payment.

2. User verification issues -
This might be likely due to bugs (or) some telephone providers not able to authenticate.

3. Ensuring users with clarity on their saving and forecasting their payouts.
Clear messaging on apps on their savings up-to-date and forecasting their payout (including fees)
This will provide users with trust (this is like how amortization schedule is provided by loan companies

How would you implement these solutions?

1. Since making circles bigger would make is business risk (risk vs reward).

We will launch this feature gradually to super (trusted) users, add few more users randomly and then provide it to everyone if there is strong demand.
We can measure the lift of the users, demand for bigger circles, revenue made by the company

2. User verification

Reach out to the user facing the issues. It might be that the users are using google voice. If this is the case, then provide more guidance on the policy on what verification is accepted.

3. Ensuring users with clarity on their saving and forecasting their payouts. - this should be relatively easy to implement and would delight the customers. Furthermore, this feature will also increase the trust int he system

If it comes to priortization - I would probably priortize "making circles bigger" since this has the most value to the business (drives increased adoption, revenue).

How would you validate your solution?

A/B tests, metrics on user adoption/users per slot/revenue.
Reduction of complaints on verification in Appstore