Banca Comerciala Romana (BCR) is a reference point for financial education in Romania. This happened since 2018, when they held the largest financial literacy lesson, which ended in the Guinness World Records. The next year, in 2019, BCR organized Financial Education Month in Romania. And later, in 2020 they stepped up the game investing in a financial education platform for Romanians of all ages.
A PWA is an app that offers a better experience to users than a classic app. As we have been creating the platform responsive for all resolutions, it came easier for us to create the Progressive Web App for Scoala de Bani. While on the Scoala de Bani financial e-learning platform, you can add it to your phones’ home screen without needing to install it.
After adding it, the PWA works in offline mode, sending push notifications. It completes the users’ experience as they can continue their courses anywhere from their phone, or they can use the PWA for the financial calculator.
The financial calculator was a functionality that challenged both our design and strategy department. It was an essential tool, but needed to be improved for a more seamless user experience. Before the reshape, the calculator had plenty of fields that could become overwhelming when completing them, we needed to make it simpler, friendlier and more visual. Therefore, our design and strategy departments worked closely to find the best solution for our clients’ and end-users’ needs.
As we have an agile approach to our projects, we worked in sprints of two weeks, ending each sprint with a presentation to our client. These presentations happened under the form of a High Fidelity Prototype as well as functionalities’ validation. When we offered them under a prototype form, the development department could understand the flow quicker.
To improve the implementation process, we used a UI library called Ant Design from the project’s beginnings. It supported the development process and saved us a lot of time in styling UI elements. Our design and development team could focus more on UX, rather than creating UI components over and over. This was a big win as the platforms’ audiences varied and we needed to assure the best possible experience for each group category.
Even though we were used to React, this time we tried a relatively new framework: Next.js and it went a bit different. So we managed to compensate for the fast loading time with animations. And due to the variety of audiences the platform was addressing, we had to make sure that the user can have the same experience on each browser, including Internet Explorer.
Scoala de Bani is one of BCR’s platforms, along with George, Scoala de Business and Innovix. With these platforms, BCR has a holistic approach to finances and banking offering educational materials for young adults, financial products, etc.
Scoala de Bani is meant for the financial education part. It is a platform with plenty of courses like Financial Mindfulness, but the user’s interaction with the platform doesn’t stop there. It also offers tools to help users manage their finances throughout their life and achieve their goals.
We are happy we could be a part of such a transformative project, delivering a fast and good digital product. During its development, each one of us learned something new and insightful about managing finance. This confirmed to us once more how important this platform will be for romanian users, and what impact it’ll have on the community, its audience being quite large (from teens to professionals, parents and teachers). Scoala de Bani is the only digital platform for free financial education in Romania and it will be continuously improved with new functionalities and tools, educating plenty of users about financial responsibility until now, and the number increases.
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