Hay launches with CXM as fundamental part of go-to-market strategy

Hay is a small but mighty team whose vision is to deliver extraordinary payment experiences. Built entirely as digital and mobile-first, Hay is an Australian fintech provider that aims to improve people’s lives by allowing them more financial access and flexibility, while providing increased control to manage and better understand their money.

Key to enabling this purely digital experience with deeply human interaction capabilities is Hay’s cloud-native platform that allows for rapid innovation through a microservice architecture and APIs. This is a major departure from legacy banking platforms, which are complex stacked systems that are less agile, harder to maintain, and far more costly to run.

According to Jason Latham, chief technology and information officer for Hay: “We built our platform to allow for flexibility and fast, secure integrations with best-in-class providers and services to improve our products.” Understanding the importance of a sound customer experience management (CXM) strategy, Hay turned to Adobe Experience Cloud with the objective of providing the same level of digital experience in its customer experience as it does in its product experience, across key customer touchpoints such as the Hay mobile app and website.

Hay offers customers an online account that is accessible through its website and a mobile app. It also gives customers a prepaid Visa card. Using Hay, a new customer can open and fund their account and start spending with their digital wallet (Apple Pay or Google Pay) in less than seven minutes. The company doesn’t charge account fees, and offers fee-free online and in-store international purchases, instant payments via contacts, enriched payment data, monthly spend tracking, and more, all through the Hay app. These are only a few features the company has added in the last eight months.

During the pre-launch pilot, Hay implemented Adobe Analytics to measure how people were interacting with the Hay app and used the data and insights to make valuable improvements prior to the launch.

“Everything launched on February 17, 2020 – our app, our website, and our go-to-market campaign,” says Brad Pidgeon, head of digital at Hay. “That will be burned into my mind until the end of time, because we managed to implement, test and go live with Adobe Analytics, Launch, Audience Manager and Target, integrate Adobe Mobile Services SDK into the Hay app and build a website from scratch within seven and a half months, all while our app and its launch features were still in development! It was an amazing sense of relief and accomplishment to go live that day.”

Hay commenced implementation of its Adobe Experience Cloud applications in June 2019 and by August had its first active workspace running in Analytics with tagging of their teaser site running in Launch.

Personalisation makes for better experiences

By using Analytics, the Hay team could instantly see what customers were interacting with and how much time they spent on the website or in the app. Moreover, if a customer signed in on an Apple or iOS device, they only saw Apple prompts and were directed to download on the App Store; whereas if they signed in on Android, they were directed to the Google Play Store. These specific Apple and Android calls to action, enabled by Adobe Target, are fundamental to making experiences easier and more personalised and seamless for customers.

Six weeks into a successful launch, COVID-19 hit on a global scale. The retail market slowed down significantly as well as international travel disappearing overnight. “Hay combines the best features of an everyday account with an amazing travel experience,” says Alex Lloyd, chief brand and marketing officer at Hay. “But with the international travel functionality unable to be used we decided to focus on the domestic experience and improving and adding to the everyday transaction and payment experiences we provided.”

The team also used this time as an opportunity to evaluate and evolve their business. For example, they re-examined their onboarding experience to better diagnose and understand drop-offs in customer conversion. Adobe Analytics helped them measure every step of the onboarding funnel and identify key areas for improvement. Within a week, Hay was able to achieve an improvement of 265 percent in the flow from initial account openings to completion. In traditional banking, this process would normally take months.

As Hay has continued to evolve its business and implement more features, the ability to measure and optimize customer journeys has been extremely important. Adding these features to measurement flows has been easy with Analytics. The team has also started using Adobe Audience Manager to create segments, such as those customers who have tried to refer others to Hay and those that use the HayPay feature that instantly sends money to another Hay user. They look forward to taking advantage of features such as lookalike modeling in paid media efforts in 2021.

In another example, the team wanted to measure its TinyBig rewards referral program, where a customer receives 1 percent cashback on transactions of $10 or less for the life of the product if they refer a new customer to Hay. “Quickly and easily, I was able to build a dashboard in Adobe Analytics to measure what people were doing, how they were referring their friends, and where they were coming from,” says Pidgeon. “Once it was implemented, within hours we could see how people were using the program, which helped us plan the next iteration as we further developed our product.”

Better insights reveal new opportunities

During COVID-19, Hay has been able to incrementally build its retail business while discovering a large demand from other fintechs for fast, flexible and secure access to banking services.

The industry has taken notice of how quickly Hay was able to take its service to market. “We were able to integrate the Visa scheme rails in as quickly as three months,” says Lloyd. “And more recently, launching a mobile-first nonbank lender from design to first loan in the same amount of time. We are getting tremendous interest and we now have a full pipeline to develop commercial arrangements providing access to the Hay as a Service (HaaS) platform for other companies.”

Through its platform services, Hay offers a range of services to companies – whether it is tokenization for digital wallets, providing fraud services, accessing scheme or non-scheme rails, or issuing cards. “We’re building this service in tandem with our retail offering, and now they’re both growing at a significant pace,” says Lloyd. “And really, Hay is a best in-class execution, demonstrating what our platform is capable of.”

Looking back, Lloyd believes that Hay’s success up to this point has been due to the maximum efficiencies that Hay finds in the solutions it invests in. Rather than investing in a wide number of solutions and only using five percent of its capabilities, Hay has worked with Adobe to identify the solutions that would give it the maximum value from the start: Adobe Analytics, Target, and Audience Manager.

“With the flexibility of the platform and power of Adobe Experience Cloud, we’ve been able to consistently scale with very quick improvements at low cost,” says Pidgeon. “It’s a huge advantage to find a provider that works hard as a true partner to the business – and with the return on investment we’ve seen with Adobe, it’s been a game-changer.”

The future looks bright for Hay as it continues to evolve. “By measuring how our customers are interacting with our business and making significant improvements to their experiences, we’ve been able to grow even in the midst of a global pandemic,” says Pidgeon. “We are confident in our ability to grow adoption through both Hay and HaaS, working with Adobe to launch personalized campaigns across every digital touchpoint we have with our customers to deliver even better experiences.”