XME PAY

Simplify everyday life by making digital payments possible from your
smartphone. From this specific requirement comes an ambitious project for Intesa Sanpaolo Bank aimed straight at conquering a growing space in the recurrent habits of final consumers.
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The project was developed within the Digital Factory of Intesa San Paolo, a context based on agile methodology and collaborative design.
A heterogeneous and multidisciplinary team, coming from the different function profiles within the bank organisation, collaborates to devise a tool for digital payments, the method: continuous comparison moderated by a team of service and experience designers, crossing all the multidisciplinary skills brought by team members.
Crispy Bacon was involved to coordinate the strategic cross-UX project, in order to architect, measure and improve the final output, eg. the XME Pay app.
The activity carried out between 2017 and 2018 followed an Agile approach, favoured by complete decision-making autonomy for all the people involved, and accompanied by the design thinking methodology: an interconnection between innovation and digital
technology based on people’s real needs.

XME Pay was a strategic project with two main objectives. The first, the
business requirement defined by Intesa Sanpaolo: knowing how to make contactless payment faster and more intuitive through an app, and make it preferable to cash. The second, the supporting goal for Crispy Bacon: being able to create a design culture, helping the design team to understand the potential and importance of design for the strategic transformation of business. Above all, encourage all the parties involved to adopt
this methodology and extend it to all projects.

In addition, Crispy Bacon had to take into consideration the need to integrate everything with the already existing ecosystem inside the bank. XME Pay was not born as an independent app but framed within a home banking service used by people of all ages and cultural extraction, from teenagers to elderly to the least tech-friendly users.

Conducting, moderating and coordinating a group of twenty people, with different studies, personal and work background was a stimulating test for Crispy Bacon. The moderate constructive dialogue has allowed heterogeneity to emerge, from all the various functions of the bank, thus creating a tool useful for all people but also at the forefront in the articulated panorama of digital payments.

Crispy Bacon has pursued its disruptive approach thanks to a strong know-
how. The work experience gained from working in multiple industries has allowed us not to stop at a UX study merely focused on finance and banking, on the contrary to produce a transversal, cross-pollinating, enriching tool.

In addition to this, Crispy Bacon acted as a linking bridge between the UX and the development of the XME Pay application. While the working group elaborated and defined ideas on the product that Intesa Sanpaolo was supposed to carry out (using market
surveys and studies on the needs of the entire customer base) Crispy Bacon operated to validate and refine certain design choices, foreseeing the problems already in the design phase, favoring its development and integration with the bank’s existing services.

The strong development skills and refined UX skills allowed Crispy Bacon to
secure the overall success of this project, winning complete trust of the bank itself.
But this didn’t end up being only a successful job just for the final output (eg. an application constantly improved thanks to the KPI measurement). The real success is above all in terms of cultural innovation and synergies with the customer.
XME Pay has transformed for the better the perception on how key is user experience and how tangible and determinant is the design component within a project.