Onboarding project | Indie by IndusInd

Hi Fam, I'm Vignesh from Delhi. I'm currently in between jobs (i.e. exiting IDFC FIRST Bank and will be joining IndusInd Bank post completion of my gardening leave period). I choose IDFC FIRST Bank for my acquisition project and am choosing Indie by IndusInd for onboarding project to get a good flavour between my past and future :) Let's Jump In.

Indie by IndusInd - A story in itself

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IndusInd bank has a very interesting history. Despite being the first private bank to be founded in India, just post the liberalisation of economy, in 1994, the bank hasn't grown to become a behemoth like its peers ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank. It remains a relatively large bank (Amongst the Top 7 in private banks) with reasonable profits, largely due to its conservative approach.

Of late though, they have been doing some interesting things, largely unnoticed but interesting nevertheless. They launched a card that could act as a credit/debit or emi card buy selecting a "button" on the physical card, they have some decent innovations on the payments side but none of these bets were as big as "Indie" by IndusInd.

As per the inside story, Indie was conceived as a separate fintech unit within the bank with its own teams on business, product, tech, marketing and even support functions as a challenger to the main bank. It aimed to bring in a new era of innovation unconstrained by the thought process of traditional bankers and this was during the heydays of 2015-2022 when demonetisation happened, fintech firms were getting shit loads of money from venture capitalists,Kotak 811 was making waves in the market and RBI was contemplating issuing Digital Banking Licenses. The thought was to create Indie as a separately valuable entity that can potentially be spun off or IPO to create further value for the share holders of the bank.

While the execution continued at the pace which it could for this dream, fintechs lost their flavour, BNPL became a taboo word and RBI came down heavily on digital lending, rendering the spin off ideas a pipe dream. They were able to finally launch to public in July 2023 and the app has been downloaded roughly over 1.4 Mn times so far and the MAU numbers are in the 300-400K range.

But soon after launching, they realised that customers are getting confused by Indie and IndusInd bank, especially so because customers were requested to open an Indie Account in the MVP version of the app even if they already had an existing account with IndusInd bank. There were also two apps on the App and Play store - "Indie" catering to the customers onboarded through the Indie app and "Indus Mobile" catering to the customers of the bank. This led to massive confusion and low balance build ups in Savings account with Indie as people feared that this entity is separate and doesn't have the same trust factor associated with a bank.

Now the bank is in the process of migrating all customers into one app the new "Indie" app and thats where a lot of action is these days. I certainly hope this goes off well, given my KRA is to get balances in Indie Accounts but that is for another day.

A bit more about the product / product(s) - For better context

If you download the Indie app right now for either app store or play store, you will see 4 product options that you can get onboarded to namely

1. Savings Account
2. Line of Credit
3. Fixed Deposits
4. Investments (mainly mutual funds) supported through Paytm Money

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This is however still the least of the problems for the user flow. You see, if you remember, I mentioned that Indie is different but same from IndusInd? IndusInd also offers savings account opening online and many different versions of it. So even if one wants to open a savings account the user has following journey options

1. The web journey for opening savings account with IndusInd Bank which thankfully is device size responsive
2. The app only journey supported by Indie
3. The web journey for Indie that will go live soon

I will get into a lot more depth on this in the onboarding tear down section. For now lets move on to understanding the app is faring in general.

Indie App & Website Audit

Similar Web

Total Visits : 121K in July'24 down 28%! from last month

Device Distribution: Mainly mobile web (83%)

Visit Duration: 01:22

Bounce Rate: 74.47%

Pages/Visit: 1.78

None of these numbers currently inspire any confidence of a thriving website. Clearly some work needs to go here.

Marketing Channels:

Direct : 36.3%

Referral: 9.81%

Social: 2.64%

Organic Search: 44.38%

Paid Search: 1.23%

Display Ads: 5.64%

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Top 10 Keywords Driving Traffic (Overall)

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Audience Insights

Gender distribution is 81.20% Male, 18.80% Female - This is in line with rest of finance apps.

Age Distribution

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SERP Audit

There are no competitive bidders on keywords of Indie or Indie by InduInd Bank.

Search for "Indie" throws Indie by IndusInd as first result but rest of the results are around indie rock banks.

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There is no Google My Business Listing claiming the business with details. Play store/ App store download options aren't thrown as results in first page for "Indie" keyword.

Playstore download is second result for keyword "Indie by IndusInd" and App store results still don't make it to the first page. Instead, Social media accounts of Indie (X, Instagram and LinkedIn) make it to the first page.

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PlayStore

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Main selling proposition for Indie is high interest rates, reward points in terms of Gems and Line of Credit.

Paid Ads

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Meta

1. Meta Ads were launched only thing month
2. 82 running adds
3. Most ads running across all Meta Platforms (FB, IB, Messenger, Audience Network)
4. Covering all product features
5. Some ads around engagement building including word of the week, educational content

Google

1. Ad account not separated from IndusInd Bank
2. Ads seen both for Indie and IndusInd Banking savings account (throwing customers into different flows)

I know from internal sources from that they don't run on other platforms.

ICP

I did around 10 user calls for Indie and the users who turned out were similar to IDFC save for one more user category of young users who primarily use Indie for rewards and UPI. 3 main ICPs from user research are as below

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Jobs To Be Done

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Feedback on Jobs To be Done from user conversations

Onboarding Teardown

I've broken onboarding teardown into multiple stages

1. Discovery to Download of App
2. App Onboarding - Sign up of first product

These two are common for all users of the product

3. Post onboarding - Transactions. These are unique basis the transactions you want to perform.

Discovery to Download of App

Given 75% of traffic is driven through organic search or direct currently, I'm taking the view point of the user who has researched/come to know about indie through word of mouth and has decided to search and search and download indie app.

The primary motivation (reason for hiring the product in simpler terms) for downloading the app is to

a. For ICP 1 - Open FD

b. For ICP 2 - Get Line of Credit

c. For ICP 3 - Open Savings Accounts

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You can access the slides for this teardown here. Relevant customer biases are called out in the respective slides.

Or refer to the PDF here > Onboarding Tear Down - Indie Part 1.pdf​

Overall Comments

1. The flow doesn't address All ICPs and indexes heavily on savings account opening
2. The lack of CTAs is appalling. Only CTAs present are in the first and last fold
3. The whole flow is just too text heavy. Text and Iconography can be used together to get the message conveyed to the user better. I got tuned out right after 1st fold
4. There is not enough convincing going on in terms of testimonials, awards, social proof apart from one text buried somewhere to get the user to really onboard.
5. First fold is especially glaring and doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in new customer. The whole page looks quite bad on aesthetics.

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Download to Onboarding for First Product (Savings)

Given the flow is designed in such a way that the customer needs to open a savings account before opting for any product, this flow is common for all ICPs. By "Onboarding" here I only mean the completion of sign up process. It doesn't mean that the customer is onboarded from "activation" perspective, i.e. the customer may still churn.

You can access the slides for this teardown here. Relevant customer biases are called out in the respective slides.

Or refer to the PDF here >

​Onboarding Tear Down - Indie Part 2.pdf

Overall Comments

1. The flow isn't relevant from other banking flows and in terms of no. of fields, it takes almost the bare minimum fields required for onboarding from banking regulations perspective.
2. There are many unnecessary extra screens in the flow including splash screen.
3. There is no clear view for the customer in terms of the number of steps required to complete.
4. The fact that the funding for the account is compulsory is not prepped earlier and leads to a big dissonance.
5. Video KYC flow again takes a lot of time and the customer is not prepped enough the undergo the flow. Especially given its a banking discussion, inherent feeling is to be dressed properly etc.
6. The process is long and gives the impression of being wanting to get done with instead of leading to "aha" moments for the customer. If anything there are negative aha moments on "oh! I need to do more"

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Post Onboarding Flows - First Transactions

This flow can be different for different ICPs.

For ICP1 - The journey covered is opening of a Fixed Deposit

For ICP 3- The journey covered is payment through UPI

You can access the slides for this teardown here. Relevant customer biases are called out in the respective slides.

Or refer to the PDF here >

​Onboarding Tear Down - Indie Part 3.pdf

Overall Comments

1. For the UPI Flow, the user is provided both an SMS and Push Notification to pay using the UPI intent link, however there is no link provided in SMS to initiate the transaction in case one misses the push notification
2. User is shown a pop up that is pretty janky looking on logging into the app to approve the transaction.
3. In the payment flow, the customer is asked to select category and sub category of transaction for classification purposes. While it is optional, this is a big conversion killer and should never be done.
4. The transaction success message is ok.
5. For create deposit flow, the user is first shown a list of types of deposit they could create.
6. For Create FD, which I deep dove on the, the first screen was to select an amount, post which the fields were to select duration with separate sliders for year, month and days, this is very weird.
7. The CTA was inactive after I did this and I had to struggle before I understood that there is a scroll below this screen to first calculate maturity amount, select interest payment method, renewal criteria etc before I could create FD. This was very confusing.
8. Money got deducted automatically from savings account which is again without warning, I wanted to create FD with money from non IndusInd bank account.
9. There was a pop-up before the FD creation success screen asking user to select rewards. This is again very weird.

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Activation Metric(s)

I hypothesise the following activation metrics. Some of the these have been validated by UXR calls and data available within the eco system. Some of them are new metrics.

To understand these better, in banking parlance, certain product features are classified as "attachments" and certain product features are classified as "products".

Attachments are typically extended benefits to existing products which are optional but not compulsory. Example of attachments to a savings product include

1. Debit Card
2. UPI Handle
3. Cheque Book

Indie has a few more attachments including Virtual Debit Card and Super OTP etc.

Products have different JTBD for a customer who has onboarded for one product. For example, for a savings account product, other products include

1. Line of Credit
2. Fixed Deposit
3. Investments

Indie again has a few more products including rewards manager, money manager etc.

Apart from these 2, there are optional features in onboarding which can act as a powerful activation signal. In banking, this could be converting an EKYC (Aadhaar OTP based KYC) to a video KYC. In other areas, this could be different, for example in Spotify, this could be creating your own playlist. It is not something that is compulsory to do but signals a strong retention.

The Activation metrics I want to hypothesise depend on all the above 3 categories above.

Metrics To Track

I would track the following metrics as the owner (I literally am going to be!) of this product.

I'm not covering the acquisition metrics (such as acquisition cost, channels, channel level cost etc.) and retention metrics such as (DAU, MAU, Churn Rate etc.) here. These will of course need to be tracked and are no brainers on why they need to be tracked. I will be covering product level metrics here.

There are other metrics similar to these that can be tracked at a product level but the above gives a decent feel of what could be looked at.

Conclusions

1. As of now Indie seems to be suffering from an identity crisis where users can easily get confused between Indie and IndusInd Bank
2. There is also confusion with the app calling itself a banking super app but all communication oriented only to a savings account product with mandatory onboarding for savings account
3. The onboarding flow leaves much to be deserved with janky UI and many places being simply irrelevant for many ICPs including the ones coming for the savings account product
4. Activation is currently poor with no proper prompt for user or help for the user for them to really retain.
5. There are many optimisation opportunities which have been pointed out in the relevant breakdown sections.

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