Odiseo Viveros

Monese

I joined the team at Monese as their first designer. I was, in fact, the first employee of the company in the London office, while only 5 other colleagues worked in the Tallinn office. My task: Design the bones of a mobile-first bank. The time: Four months before the MVP needed to be fully functional for investors to approve the next round of investment. Panic!

Fortunately, with the help of soon-to-join colleagues with experience in the banking industry, the support of a highly motivated and smart senior team, and a quick-in-their-feet development team, we managed the deadline.

I researched to decide who are target group would be, I made decisions that would have a huge impact in the long run, but were necessary at that point, as we didn't have the time or capacity to build everything we wanted to build. Some of those decisions were:

• We agreed that our target audience would be Easter European migrant workers in the UK.
• Because of that, we would initially only focus on an Android app.
• We made sure that opening an account could take as little as 3 minutes, our main USP (and delivered with the MVP!).
• We wanted to add some special, unique and exciting functionality to attract users.

Four months later, Monese launched a fully functional mobile-only bank, backed by one of Estonia's biggest banks, and complying fully with British and European banking authorities.