Designing Kazakhstan's next generation banking app
Overview
ForteBank is the fifth largest bank in Kazakhstan and has been providing the banking services for more than 20 years. Aiming to become the digital leader in a growing market, Forte partnered with us to design and develop a mobile banking platform, focusing on developing new features for a younger audience.
My Role
I was assigined to oversee the ui and experience of Fortebank in a team of 2 client developers and a front end developer, a BA, QA Engineer and PM.
Client
Fortebank
Year
2018
Deliverables
User Experience
User Interface
Illustration
Animation
The Challenge
When i was involved in the project, there were certain parts that I wanted to improve in the previous design. We went to Kazakhstan to discuss new features and get to know more about our target audience. In this case, the language barrier was a big challenge since the client was very fluent in russian and Kazakh but had a hard time communicating in english.

We noticed that there wasn’t a structured information architecture so the users had a hard time navigating throughout the app. Visually, fonts were very small and texts were hard to read in most cases. So we started a general overhaul and sketched out our ideas regarding new features and how they would be implemented in the new design system. Despite our efforts, may of the ideas were not implemented.
The Outcome
The app enables its users to transfer money and pay for services. Users can also send money to a mobile phone number and receive money for a card or withdraw cash without the need of a ForteBank ATM card or an account.
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We also implemented a messaging feature that users would be able to chat with other Fortebank users and send money directly within the app, A personal assistant, and a tap to pay function that would enable users to make payments via NFC.
Fortebank
Users could complete basic banking operations such as receiving payments or paying bills as guest users. They could also open an account and become a forte bank customer.
Forte Assistant
Forte assistant is a chatbot integrated with Fortebank’s services that can send money to another Fortebank user. Forte assistant can also answer simple questions like the weather or exchange rate. We used an API that was developed by one of Fortebank's partners. In this process, we were also asked to add an instant messaging option between users but wasn't fully implemented.
Contactless Payment
We also implemented a contactless payment feature in the app with the partnership between Mastercard and Fortebank. We used Mastercard's existing infrastructure and designed the flow accordingly.