Project Overview
Pepper Group is a diversified, global financial services business with specialist experience in core disciplines of Lending, Advisory and Asset Management. The organisations global presence across APAC and European markets demands routine communication between executive international teams to track deals and investments of business-wide significance. Working across multiple time zones and countries, the business required a tool that permits instant, secure communication between executives. The resulting Pepper Pulse app enables executives to communicate responsively via a specialist, curated e-shorthand dialogue that promotes quick, secure sharing of business critical information.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Simon Torsellini
Sandeep Srinivas
Sha-mayne Chan
Nicole Pizzaro
Yann Bodson
Project Brief
Pepper engaged Alive to complete a comprehensive Business Design engagement; reviewing the business’ scope of communication tools utilised by executive teams. Working closely with the business, Alive interviewed stakeholders to identify challenges and subsequent opportunities to mobilise the offering. The team identified three key challenges:
Time-poor: Executive teams are time poor, in and out of meetings, operating across varying time and geographical divides; impacting their ability to set aside focused time to share insights and collaborate.
Limited collaboration: Collaboration between executives was rigid and pre-defined. Shared forums between executive teams were capped at to a certain quota each week, restricting communication outside of pre-defined sessions.
No single source: Information recorded by stakeholders was stored across disparate communication tools, preventing transparency and limiting the teams ability to review and compare information form one single source.
Alive and Pepper agreed a mobile app, with a curated organisational ‘e-shorthand’ that supported fast, secure communication (“Beats”); shared awareness and team collaboration was the solution to address the business’ noted challenges.
Project Need
The Pulse app represents an innovative play for Australia’s financial services industry. The app extends Pepper stakeholders a feature set and user experience that references best practice techniques employed by leading consumer communication and collaboration tools. It represents a great example of creative thinking from a sector that attracts criticism of being conservative and slow to adopt new technology.
The solution facilitates the capture and consumption of critical market, investor and deal specific information, accessible “anywhere, anytime”. Executive teams now have real-time, uniformity and understanding of individual asset owners and investors activity, the status of live deals, and the state of each geographical markets courtesy of the following features:
Beats (Notifications): Activity updates, including news on projects/contacts, urgent announcements and mentions. Feeds can be tailored to reflect users areas of interests; projects, stakeholders, companies etc.
Project list: Project profile including activity, related contacts and status.
Company list: Company profile including activity, related contacts, mentions and deal preferences.
Contact list: Single source for investor and project contacts.
User Experience
Alive are a user-centric, design-led mobile development firm. We work closely with our clients to understand, identify and prioritise opportunities where mobile technology can be used to improve the experience of users. Taking a design-led approach promotes collaboration with our clients; we sketch, test and iterate ideas to develop a solution that aligns with the requirements of the business and the people who use the technology.
The approach was no different with Pepper Pulse. Our team sat down with Pepper staff to understand the personas of the respective disciplines that comprise the executive team; CEO, Treasurer, BDM and Analysts. This process of “getting to know” the user was important as it helped us to identify the behaviours and nuances of each stakeholder, which informed the design, feature selection and navigation of the app.
The core features: dashboard, notifications, contacts, projects and customer profiles are located on the tab navigation at the bottom of the screen. The tabs permit stakeholders to easily navigate, view and interact with the suite of communication and collaboration tools.
Drawing on social tools, the app utilises ‘handles’ and hashtags to streamline communication between stakeholders. Alive curated a list of stakeholder handles with dedicated colours denoting geographical locations, permitting users to easily identify users and locations of interest.
Project Marketing
The Pulse app is an internal facing solution designed exclusively for Pepper employees. Promotion of the app to broad market channels is not applicable.
Project Privacy
Once launched, Alive has a strict privacy policy in place to ensure all online middleware and data collected via client applications is stored and managed securely. Furthermore, each customer will employ their own privacy policy that determines the conditions of use for employee data and information collected through the mobile application for use by their organisation.
FinTech
Fintech is radically changing how we live as society and how we do business professionally. We're looking for great apps that are disrupting sectors such as mobile payments, money transfers, loans, fundraising, financial management.
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