Australian Payments Plus (AP+) brings together Australia’s leading payment operators - BPAY Group, eftpos and NPP Australia - to innovate and improve the nation’s dynamic payment ecosystem. To effectively respond to the evolving needs of Australia’s consumers, businesses and government, AP+ actively engages in forward-thinking strategies to create opportunities for Australia’s payments landscape. Recently, AP+ partnered with Thoughtworks to deliver two critical streams of work with PayTo and BPAY.
BPAY as a flagship product, BPAY®, has become a trusted and preferred method for bill payments among Australians with over 70% of all citizens over the age of 18 regularly using this service for their financial needs.
Challenge
BPAY found itself grappling with some challenges that potentially hindered its future expansion. As a well established product, BPAY needed to look at sources of future growth and assess how changes in customer behavior were impacting the product.
AP+ wanted to explore opportunities that have substantial growth potential to inform BPAY’s future product growth and CX strategy. To shape BPAY’s future with confidence, AP+ turned to Thoughtworks to develop a product discovery and customer experience strategy. This strategic work could serve as the cornerstone for shaping its future product evolution — highlighting BPAY’s unique market differentiators and customer value.
Thoughtworks helped AP+ lay the foundation for thinking about BPAY’s future product evolution, garnering strategic alignment with a deep understanding of the CX and opportunity enhancements for both consumers and billers.
Approach
Together, we embarked on a journey to identify future product enhancement opportunities, lay the groundwork for how the product might evolve, foster alignment among diverse stakeholders, and boost the client’s confidence in the product’s future through CX. The product discovery and customer experience strategy work was structured into two key phases:
Phase one: Understand the current state of BPAY and identify potential future enhancement opportunities.
Phase two: Ideate and refine the customer experience for the prioritized opportunities. Assess which experience options align most effectively with its product and business strategy and chart the most promising future direction for BPAY.
Different lenses from customers, member banks, billers and tech were considered at each stage throughout to inform decision-making.
Coming together as one team, BPAY and Thoughtworkers navigated ambiguities, assessed product opportunities through a CX strategy lens to uncover future possibilities, and paved a clear path forward for the product.
Results
Over the course of four and a half months, we laid the essential foundations for BPAY’s future by determining the optimal path for possible product evolution, fostering strategic alignment, and empowering confidence through CX.
Through this engagement, we have addressed the following for BPAY:
- Strategically guiding product development: Identifying the optimal path for product evolution and where not to proceed. We’ve also helped BPAY make well-informed technical decisions. Our discovery process shed light on various potential paths, guiding the client in shaping both its technical and business decisions with newfound clarity and confidence.
- Laying the essential foundations for BPAY’s future product evolution.
- Fostering alignment: This engagement serves as a stepping stone to initiate alignment among a diverse group of stakeholders. It presents them with a common foundation to explore and understand the potential product’s path.
- Empowering confidence through CX: Through techniques like customer journey mapping and prototyping, BPAY has the ability to identify and seize unique opportunities with confidence.
Identified 17 future potential enhancement opportunities
We identified opportunities for BPAY to improve CX and expand offerings, supporting its business growth and brand relevance.
Laid the foundations for BPAY’s possible future evolution
By determining which potential enhancements to progress and where not to proceed.
Empowered confidence through CX
By visualizing the end-to-end customer experience journey, BPAY has gained profound insights into the future.
Fostered strategic alignment
We facilitated initial alignment discussions with a diverse group of stakeholders, providing them with a common foundation to explore the product’s potential trajectory.
Giving Australian Payments Plus confidence to proceed in progressing on BPAY’s future product evolution was the key outcome for the Thoughtworks team.
