Česká spořitelna is the number one bank on the Czech market and part of the Erste Group. It has over 16 million clients in Central and Eastern Europe.
In 2 months, we designed the product proposition, validated it in the market and found the product/market fit. We created marketing deliverables that helped sell the idea to the bank. This created an official product with its own team and budget.
Jan had an idea, nothing tangible in his hand yet. He needed to see if the market would want his product. As well as outputs to help push the product internally.
A third-party business platform that allows the product to be delivered directly to Erste Internet Banking. Connecting startups and real customers. Kind of like Google Play, but for finance.
Develop the idea into a concrete form so that it can be understood by the different target groups.
Test the attractiveness of the "Marketplace" extension for end users. This is analogous to Google Play or AppStore to internet banking.
Get feedback from startups, investors and accelerator programs.
And most importantly kill dysfunctional ideas at any time based on research and data.
The first step was to specify WHY and FOR WHOM we make the product. Then we created customer segments, hypothesized about their behavior and defined their main problems.
"Getting first customers is lengthy and expensive."
"Startups come to us with great ideas but no market data."
"We want to get our products and services even closer to customers and gain new marketing space."
"We need to provide our clients with more banking know-how."
We learned how the representatives of the target groups work and what problems they solve. We tested our hypotheses.
We created a faithful prototype of online banking with Marketplace extensions and specific services that customers wanted.
We created the marketing communication of the product as if it existed. Specifically, a website, a presentation, social profiles and a product video. We ran a targeted campaign.
We found the target group and actually sold our solutions. We went to countries with a more advanced market (Berlin, Barcelona). We didn't want to reinvent the wheel if someone had already been through it.
We received feedback from 40 startups across Europe and the campaigns generated 21 validated leads.
Through prototyping, we were able to validate the product without the need for expensive development.
The campaign and personal sales brought us customers before the project was even born.
With product feedback, we killed the blind spots and focused on the essentials.
The outputs helped our customer to promote the idea throughout the Erste Group.
