The Business
Green Dot is world’s largest prepaid debit card company and a payments platform (BaaS) that allows prominent consumer and technology companies to design and deploy their own customized banking and money movement solutions. Walmart MoneyCard was its largest account and reflected 60% of Green Dot’s business.
The Challenge
Innovation is a requirement for maintaining the retailer relationship with Walmart.
Walmart’s innovation requests and related timelines often appeared beyond what Green Dot resources could support. One such requirement was the demand for a suite of tiered products, with each card having unique features. This request came at a time when Green Dot was launching its own mobile product and development resources were limited.
Creating a winning product roadmap for the Walmart MoneyCard meant identifying clear customer and retailer needs.
Walmart Objectives:
Reduce customer confusion with pricing
Drive recurring reloads
Leverage the Walmart experience and marketing channels
Customer Needs:
Low fees: only pay for what I use
Convenience: able to immediately use and reload wherever I am
Rewards: provide incentives to use this payment option (e.g. cash back or interest)
In addition, there were key card features that drove Green Dot revenue (e.g. Direct Deposit).
The Approach:
To ensure that the correct product roadmap was created, I partnered with my multifunctional team and took the following approach:
Outcome:
Green Dot was able to launch new products that addressed each customer segment’s needs but in the order that made the most financial sense for all partners.
Having a ‘Just the Basics’ card allowed operations and marketing to focus its budget away from customers that needed the card for one time use and on to customers that needed to reload. Specialty cards provided products that were ideal for seasonal in store marketing campaigns. The preferred card allowed the business to focus on building education around functionality and relevant rewards.
Innovations were supported with Sales Associate training, flip books, in store guides and online comparison charts to ease explaining the Walmart MoneyCard and its features.
Further innovations were driven in a similar methodology, following an Agile development process.
Example:
A Unique Walmart Experience
The brand was able to reflect product offerings that were unique to Walmart, creating a complete customer experience.
These innovations along with pricing that transformed the prepaid industry, led to its #1 prepaid market share.
