Billion dollar businesses: What the challenger banks do differently

Monzo, Revolut and Starling, often called the challenger banks, have built billion-dollar businesses around the belief that they offer the best overall banking experience. But are they actually any better, or is it all clever marketing? To answer that question, Built for Mars Founder, Peter Ramsey who runs a UX advisory company opened 12 real bank accounts and spent three months analysing the experience of each bank.

His case study ‘The UX of Banking’, the most detailed study into the user experience (UX) of banking ever published, provides a forensic analysis of a particular feature or user journey and highlights what can be learned from the challenger banks, and used to craft better experiences in the future. Each chapter compares the UX of a particular journey: from opening an account and making a payment to freezing a card. Ramsey then benchmarks banks against each other and highlights what each had done differently, showcasing what has been done well and the mistakes that have been made.

Number of clicks to create an account. Graph courtesy of builtformars.co.uk

For example:

It took 5 times as many clicks to open an account with First Direct than it did with Revolut.
Payment notifications were at least 2x faster with the challenger banks, and in some cases 100x faster
These were the only 3 banks to send notifications when someone attempted to use a frozen card

His case study ‘The UX of Banking’ is available to read online at https://builtformars.co.uk/banks/

About Built for Mars

In 2013, Peter Ramsey founded Movem; a FinTech / PropTech company which was acquired in 2018 in a deal backed by one of the largest private equity firms in the world. Since then, Ramsey has spent his time helping others build better products. From billion dollar companies based out in San Francisco, to bedroom start-ups in the UK. Ramsey has been annotating user journeys for years and late in 2019, he decided to start publishing free case studies on Built for Mars in the hope that it’d help more people learn about product design. The concept behind the name ‘Built for Mars’ is that if a product was perfect, it’d be usable in a crater on Mars!

For further information visit https://builtformars.co.uk/