Zopa Bank
Overview: Zopa x Planes
Zopa is evolving from being known primarily as a trusted peer-to-peer lender to becoming a holistic money management brand - one that helps customers confidently manage, move, and make decisions about their money every day.
To achieve this, Zopa needs to clarify how its customer experience, products, and brand come together to support both growth (to 5M+ customers) and deeper engagement with existing users.
The Challenge
As Zopa expands into current accounts, savings, and day-to-day spending, the team needs a clear understanding of:
What role Zopa should play in customers’ financial lives
Which customer problems and jobs-to-be-done matter most
How to design seamless experiences across money I have and money I borrow
How to bring together the different verticles that have evolved within the bank in a way that makes sense for customers
Planes has been brought in to help define that future customer experience - translating Zopa’s strategic ambition into testable, human-centred journeys and concepts.
Planes' role is to:
1. Clarify and prioritise the opportunity: Build alignment around customer needs, JTBD, and focus areas that best express Zopa’s proposition.
2. Design and validate key experiences: Work through three sprints to prototype, test, and iterate the end-to-end money management experience - starting with the ‘Mid-Cycle’ period (everyday spending between paydays).
3. Deliver clear outputs:
Validated to-be user journeys and flows
Tested design concepts (foundational + innovative)
A prioritised backlog of opportunities for delivery
Shared principles for how Zopa can differentiate through experience
Discovery: Modelling How Zopa Customers Think About Money
We synthesised existing Zopa research to understand how different customers mentally model money and make financial decisions.
Plotting the 7 segments on the matrix
Stakeholders interviews
We Interviewed stakeholders in order to discover and understand how they think about their finances.
Concepts
Based on the interview insights from Sprin 1 we prepared in Sprint 2 three design concepts to test with users.
Design workshop with the stakeholders
Explorations
Final concepts
At the end of Sprint 3 we landed on two concepts, Everyday and Planets. Everyday organises your money by time, while Planets organises it around the different parts of your life.
Everyday
The Everyday concept organises your money around time: what's happening now, what's coming next, and what you're building towards. Everyday shows the present, with live balances, recent activity and the bills landing this week.Borrowing looks at the near future and what's left to repay, while Savings looks further ahead at the wealth you're growing over years.
Planets
The Planets concept organises the app around the parts of your life, with each goal like a first home, a new car or a holiday living in its own dedicated space. Every planet holds its own money, pots and progress, so you can switch between them the way you'd switch between cards in your wallet.
Because each planet knows its purpose, it serves the right products and guidance for that moment, from deposit calculators and mortgage guides to loans and travel savings.
