Signing up for Volt Bank was a completely different experience from the other neobanks. Volt Bank have gone beyond the concept of signing up for a waitlist but short of Xinja’s MVP approach of launching a prepaid card and getting you to start using their banking app right away. Instead Volt Bank gets you to download what can best be described as a waitlist app.
The Volt Bank landing page is all about minimalism. No tag-lines, no vision statement, not even the standard call-to-action button on the centre of the frame. Just a sentence that says “We are Volt” and an arrow that scrolls down the page.
No call-to-action buttons
The copy on the rest of the page is pretty standard for what we have seen so far: That they are a new digital bank, that their focus is on the user, they’re going to use the best tech and will help the user save time and money.
And still no call-to-action button. Breaking from what’s become the norm of constantly putting a button in front of the user’s face, Volt Bank’s landing page gets you to scroll all the way down the page before you finally get to the call-to-action button of ‘Get early access’
The rest of the site is light on details. We’re almost spoilt after the experience of signing up with Douggh and the amount of detail we got from them. It doesn’t look as though Volt Bank is trying to channel people to the app either because the landing page isn’t creating any sort of conversion funnel – it’s a very light, oh-by-the-way, we have this app.
Ignore the reviews – It’s a clever app
The waitlist app appears to be a mixed bag, with a middling 3.3 rating on the Play Store from 9 reviews, all of which came in the last 24 hours.
But that, in a few months won’t mean anything.
And sure enough, the app doesn’t do justice to the reviews. It’s a perfect definition of an MVP.
The account creation part is super easy – Just the name, email address and year of birth.
I have to highlight the little touch here of stripping away anything that’s not necessary right now. Even something as simple as age. By asking for just the year of birth, they’re ticking the box that says “Yes, the user says they’re 18.” And I can hear the Risk/Compliance folks going “But technically, you can still be in your 18th year and not be 18.”
When it’s actually time to open the account, get the user to scan their drivers licence, right now we don’t need it so move on. UX props here.
Well done Volt Bank. Well done
The dashboard looks very lean on features – An events section where you can find out where their next event is at and sign up for it. And a bunch of surveys. But that’s the clever part.
Volt Bank is quickly and cleverly creating a psychographic profile of their users by asking them what their savings goals are and what they would do with a lump sum right now.
My hypothesis here would to put users into goal buckets of Immediate for responses like ‘go on a holiday’, bucket of short-term goal, for responses like ‘buy a car’ or a bucket of mid/long-term-goal for responses like ‘save for a deposit to buy a house.’
And for the question of what they would do with a lump sum of $10K right now, you could bucket users into personas like savers (for those who say they would save/invest it), spenders (for those who say things like ‘go on the holiday I had been saving for’) and practical – for those who say things like save some and spend some.
That’s some clever thinking there Volt Bank.
Closing thoughts: Looks like there are different teams at play here – one for the website and one for the app. The latter is a clever MVP and the former is light on focus and information (compared to what the others are doing) and unfortunately, doesn’t quite do justice to the app.
