Turning conversations into transactions

The problem

Botim is used every day for calls, but chat engagement lagged behind the apps people use every day, and only a small share of users ever touched its fintech services. Messaging felt functional rather than personal, and payments lived behind separate tabs, so the moments where money naturally comes up in a conversation (a birthday, a shared dinner, sending money home) were lost.

How I approached it

First, make chat a daily habit

• Made chats feel like the moment. I introduced chat themes, set per chat from the contact profile with a live preview, and festive themes like Halloween offered through an in-chat prompt. Celebration animations mark birthdays and congratulations.
• Gave people new ways to express themselves. I brought GIFs into chat through a rich-media integration, alongside stickers and other expressive formats.
• Invested in the most-used media. Voice notes are the most used media type on Botim chat, so I prioritised voice-note enhancements that make recording and listening smoother.
• Sweated the small details. A larger input-bar font, Reply-to on all media types and a smoother notification opt-in, backed by delivery quality improvements and a version-compatibility framework so new features degrade gracefully on older app versions.

Then, turn conversations into money moments

• Found the money moments in chat. I mapped where users already talk about money and prioritised the ones with the highest intent: gifting, splitting a bill, collecting money for a group and sending money home.
• Made the entry point part of the conversation. A Dirham-icon tooltip, a pulsating payment call to action and contextual celebrations (birthday and congratulations animations that nudge a gift) put payments one tap away, inside the chat.
• Brought money reminders into the chat list. EasyCash repayments now show up as a Bill Reminder, and turn into a red Bill Overdue alert, right on the chat list, so users see what they owe where they spend their day.
• Built one framework instead of many screens. I designed a single transaction message-card framework that works for P2P, AANI, gifts and remittances, so every new transfer type ships as a configuration, not a rebuild.
• Measured causally. Every change ran as a controlled experiment with clean control groups, measured on incremental transacting users rather than raw clicks.

Outcome

• Messages sent per user per day grew from 18.5 to 23.8 in six months.
• ~58k new fintech transacting users attributable to the comms-to-fintech initiatives.
• 3% uplift in EasyCash lending repayments after Bill Reminder and Bill Overdue alerts moved into the chat list, with 7% of users opening those messages.
• The card framework is now the shared base for new transfer types across squads.

Design