In order to meet truck driver’s needs to have a faster and cheaper way to move money, CloudTrucks developed the Instant Transfer feature in two phases to enable faster money transfers. Phase one focused on building the core functionality for quick, seamless payments. In phase two, we integrated a new payment service provider to reduce costs and featured new onboarding design and card management for broader use cases. This resulted in $31 million in cash flow and $640k in net revenue.
Drivers need to transfer money from their CT Cash balance to external bank accounts for activities that only banks support. Previously, ACH transfers were the only option, taking 2-3 business days, frustrating users needing quicker access.
In order to do so, users linked their CT Cash card to external platforms. As of March 2022, 8.4% of CT Cash Card transactions occurred via Cash App, Venmo, or PayPal, with users paying up to a 4.5% fee, reflecting a high willingness to pay.
Firstly I did research on some of the popular money transfer tools like Venmo and Google Pay.
I learned that instant transfer from a PSP (Payment service provider) to a bank has a pretty standard user experience. However, I still defined design opportunities that will impact our users.
1. How might we communicate clearly to users about the differences between ACH and Instant Transfer to help them make a better choice for their needs.
2. How might we help users calculate the cost of instant transfer more easily so that it requires no overthinking.
We looked at driver’s transfer history, and found that drivers normally only transfer the exact amount that they need. With this insight, we started to explore potential solutions. Firstly, we wanted to figure out how we charge the fee and the experience of choosing different transfer speed.
We also decided to add a built-in fee and total calculator to streamline the process and save users time. We went through several rounds of iterations on fee calculator before we had a final solution.
We prioritized the transfer method selection as the first step to provide users with clear information on transfer speeds, fees, and daily limits associated with Instant Transfers. To align with common user behavior, we designed the transfer amount input to reflect the expected received amount, with fees calculated and added on top.
As of Dec 2023, $21 million has been transferred through Instant Transfer, driving a revenue of $426k.
In October 2023, we are migrating Instant Transfer from Stripe to Astra in order to save on costs. Design updates were needed in order to implement this change.
Astra's required onboarding and personal card management could lead to delays in time-sensitive transfers and confusion in fleets with multiple admins.
Initially, the Astra verification flow was implemented just before the transaction process. However, upon launching it for our pioneer users, we received a lot of reports of verification failures due to various issues. It was very frustrating because Instant Transfer is time-sensitive.
To solve this problem, we have now integrated Astra verification into the CloudTrucks new user onboarding flow. This adjustment ensures users have enough time to complete the onboarding process before they encounter an urgent need to transfer funds, resulting in a smoother and more reliable experience.
Moving Astra verification to onboarding to ensure timely transactions.
We have successfully switched most of the users to Astra, which helped CloudTrucks saving cost. Users also have more flexibility on selecting transfer destinations. However, we did see the increase of calls regarding issues with Instant Transfer due to the instability of the service that Astra provided. To help with this situation, we designed a more thorough information validation flow to help avoid hiccups in the onboarding flow, and overall more detailed error messaging communication languages. Now more metrics are being monitored to help us decide the next step.
