Interswitch Authenticator: A proprietary authenticator helping banks to offer stronger product security to customers.
Summary
A proprietary authenticator helping banks offer stronger product security to customers. Nigerian financial institutions prefer proprietary authenticators for transaction security over widely available ones. I designed a white-labelled authenticator giving these institutions two-layer security for their customers, plus an admin product letting the institutions and Interswitch manage their respective customers. I was the sole designer on this project, handling research, product design and collaborating with product management, engineering and business development.
Shaping the strategy around our customers
Although the end consumers of this product were customers of financial institutions, our primary customers were the financial institutions themselves acquiring and adopting the product. So part of our design strategy was shaped around two business goals:
- Secure first sales
- Drive initial adoption
Securing first sales & driving initial adoption
To support the business, product and sales teams, we developed a few strategies to guide design:
1. Design for easy adoption (financial institutions). We provided design guides for how the authenticator app could be adopted within a financial institution’s own banking platforms.
2. Design for easy adoption (end customers). The solution had to cater well to a wide range of each institution’s customers.
- UX design: given the broad target audience across age and tech-savviness, we adopted the lowest-common-denominator principle for accessibility and usability, with flows and patterns established across popular authentication apps.
- UI design: the design leveraged OS-native components for recognition and familiarity, aiding ease of use.
3. Design for client-centric visualisation. We created mockups of the product with each customer’s own branding, to help business/sales teams pitch it and help customers envision the product as their own.
4. Scalable customisation. We offered potential customers some individuality to assuage worries about market uniformity that typically come with white-labelled products, designing multiple options for select app pages. The default SDK designs were black and white for neutrality.
The admin app
After developing the consumer app, we built an admin-side product letting financial institutions manage their customers, and letting Interswitch manage the financial institutions.
