Monthly
Monthly is a product that allows people take rent loans, and pay it back monthly, so as to help their financial freedom and flexibility.
2022
Type - Fintech
Role - Product Designer
Platform - Mobile Application, Website
Brief
A lot of landlords, especially in this part of the world prefer to ask for a year down payment of rent before a tenant moves in, some even ask for two years and after speaking to quite a number of tenants who are looking for houses currently, we figured that this arrangement isn’t easy for them, some of them might not have the whole money to pay at that point in time while some might have but it isn’t convenient for them to pay a huge sum and will rather prefer a montly payment plan. This is where this product comes in, they apply for the rent loan, we send the yearly rent to their landlords and they refund to us on the application every month.
The challenge
- How do we build a usable product that solves the issue of yearly payment of rent by the tenant and make life easier for them.
- How do we validate the tenants financial background so we will know if they have the ability to pay back their loans
- How do we build a seamless platform where it is easy for the tenant to pay back loans
My Role & the team
I was strictly in charge of the product design work on this product, for the mobile apps (iOS & Android) and the marketing website, I worked in a design team of 2 people where I led the product design efforts and the second person Adeniyi Oyenaike led the graphic design (logo, icons packs etc) efforts.
Research & User Experience
We got the incentive to build Monthly after seeing a number of people on Twitter complain about how ridiculous it is that they have to pay a full years rent before being able to move into an apartment, a poll was conducted and we realized that 72% of people do not have up to the amount to pay a full year down payment, while 26% have that amount but they’d rather not and they prefer a payment plan approach, the remaining 2% were fine with paying for everything at once.
After doing this poll and speaking to some other people with similar issues, we decided to speak to a few landlords and the reasons below are why they insist on a full year down payment :
- They do not trust that tenants will keep to their side of the deal if they decide to work on a payment plan.
- They prefer to collect a large sum so incase they want to do some house repairs they have the money to do that.
After speaking to Landlords we realized the major issue here is trust, and in tackling that on our product we included a KYC (Know Your Customer) flow which consists of ;
- Landlords Bank Details, so we can pay in directly to your landlord
- Bank Statement upload, so we know if you are able to repay the loan.
- House address, so we know where to look for you if you default payment
- Guarantor Information, incase you go MIA (Missing In Action)
The Solution
After we had gathered all the information in the research stage the next thing we did as a team was to work on the user journey that we want to give the users of the product and also work on low fidelity wireframes
Some parts of the low level wire frame
Visual Design
Sign In Screen
On this screen, you sign in with your details i.e username and password, this is basically a welcome screen, once you get through this screen with your details you can then try and access a rent loan.
Loans
On this screen, you input the details of your loan, i.e How much you want to loan and how long you want to pay the loan for, once you do that a quick calculation is done telling you how much you have to be earning currently to access the loan in question. If you come to this screen and you haven’t completed your KYC, you are urged to do so, so you can have access to the loan.
Complete KYC
The point of this screen is just you giving us some extra details about you i.e your address, verifying your identity, uploading a bank statement so we can confirm if you are eligible for the loan in question and also your proof of address so we can confirm if where you inputed as your address tallies with what is on the proof of address.
More Visuals from the project
Website Design
Challenges and Takeaways
A common issue we faced in building this product was trying to convince users that our interest rates aren’t bad and that we can be trusted because we are always on their side. A major takeaway is that users were very receptive to the idea of not having to dump a huge sum at once for rent and I think more landlords should adopt this moving forward.
Conclusion and Outcome
The product is still in the beta stage, but the plan is to roll it out in phases to validate and get user feedback, and iterate before releasing the final version of the app.