Case Study; FriendLuy - Financial Access for the Unbanked.

FriendLuy is an online money lending app that is currently in the stage of seed funding based in Cambodia, they are operating on a smaller scale and have not yet been published, we helped them build a better experience for the Cambodian people reaching for their financial help access.

One of the biggest problems they face apart from having to have valuable assets as collateral and to fill up long forms is to essentially build their own eKYC or a credit database that still has to be familiarized in a country like Cambodia.

With this being one of the biggest problems, even the smallest economic contributor like vendor sellers and shop owners in the market won't have the chance to:

improve their business, or simply access financial help should a need arise as oppose to the wealthier society.

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Developing the brand

The first thing we do, as a brand experience agency, when developing a brand is: removing cognitive bias, we ask questions who are we building this for, what is the sole reason for the existence of this brand.

The why

FriendLuy is built upon empathy over what is currently happening in Cambodian economic inequality among their society. The gap between the rich and the poor is just doesn't make sense. And what happens when the gap of wealth is too big? Financial literacy is a commodity that not everyone in Cambodia would have in their mind, as a result, Cambodia has 70+ microfinance of which some of them can really take such a high fee.

The fact that credit scoring is yet to be familiarized here, Cambodia also comes with one of the highest default rates in the world. On top of that, some sharkloans within the country can charge up to 40% fee with very high/ valuable collaterals like land certificates and so on.

FriendLuy wants to bridge the gap, between creating a higher awareness over financial literacy and ease of financial help access.

The Brand

The logo is inspired by an infinity relationship emphasizing the word "friend" as a persona that you can trust. A tone and persona within FriendLuy's brand should go along with the color that we also choose of which the blue and the green to symbolize stability, and a nurturing environment.

These are the words we use to direct the brand to the phase of where it is currently at.

This emotion and rationale we are trying to reach are implemented within the brand guided by the tone, voice, and how we carefully craft each reach of the brand making sure that it would maintain its consistency but also flexibility.

Our tone and voice make sure that, we are in the realm of banking the unbanked people of Cambodia.

Crafting the experience

Armed with the fact that financial literacy is not within everyone's we understand that filling up a lengthy process will give them a sense of difficulty as oppose to the main reason of FriendLuy, to make financial help easy.

We did A/B research on over 100 people through forms that we advertised to the people through Facebook ads, so that people who’d like to take the test, would voluntarily free their time in return to get a feature discount. And as shown in the analytics most of their customer left during the “registration” process because of continuous questions in an AI-based chat. And from there, we did our study where, people are actually inclined to go further if we categorize forms in a more efficient way, the sense of “completion” is achieved by the idea of finishing one form category at a time.

We realize that the pain point as a user was when they really want to use the service, but the excessive amount of work they have to do before even getting into the app, as they call it “registration/application process”. We make sure that we remove our cognitive bias by really having a real emphatic environment. By doing so, we really dive deep into what is really necessary to be asked in the beginning, with the right knowledge in hand we understand that we also need to take into account in regards of the safety of the company and what are compromises we can do, in order to create a happy user journey.

From there we negotiate and pay attention to what would feel easy and what is necessary to be a synchronized harmony when you’re registering yourself to take a microloan, and making sure the user understands that all these questions will be rewarded by the end of the journey. Keeping them reminded that the process is only 5 steps and awarding it by successful message on each, is a motivation incentive to get them closer to their goal.  

We also believe that successful interaction is where there's a loop of feedback.

Current status

Due to COVID19 FriendLuy is still on hold.

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