Airtel Payments Bank App
- Status
- Field report v1
- Duration
- Three quarters
- Case type
- Research + product strategy
- Role
- Head of Product Design
- Team
- ~10 designers, 4 PMs, 30 engineers, 2 researchers, 1 analytics lead, plus QA, growth, security, and compliance
- 120M+
- Airtel ThanksApp monthly users (distribution tradeoff)
- 1%
- Public rollout after employee launch
- 3 quarters
- Strategy, research, design, and ship
- 60-70 users
- Research across rural, tier-1, and tier-2 markets
- 5-part construct
- Trust, service, growth, discovery, experimentation
The bank was growing inside an app that was not primarily a bank app.
Airtel Payments Bank lived inside Airtel ThanksApp, a large telco-led super-app. The bank had access to massive distribution, but customers still had to enter a broader Airtel environment and discover banking through the Money/banking section.
This created a discovery problem. Users coming from products like NCMC, FASTag, debit card, or account opening could use the bank for one product without discovering the larger relationship.
For a regulated bank, the app surface was becoming too important to remain one step away.
Should the bank have its own app?
The decision was not obvious.
ThanksApp gave the bank a powerful zero-CAC acquisition channel and access to a 120M+ monthly user surface.
But the bank also needed stronger control over discovery, cross-sell, brand identity, security posture, customer engagement, and homepage real estate.
The work started with a strategic question: should Airtel Payments Bank continue as a section inside a super-app, or own a focused banking surface?
Controlled decoupling.
This was never a clean break from ThanksApp.
It was a controlled decoupling.
ThanksApp remained the acquisition engine. Airtel Payments Bank App became the engagement engine: a bank-owned surface for product discovery, trust, self-service, cross-sell, and deeper customer relationships.
The challenge was to make both surfaces coexist without confusing users.
Research validated the need for a bank-owned surface.
We conducted moderated usability testing, prototype testing, field research, concept testing, task-based testing, interviews, and competitor comparison with roughly 60-70 users across rural, tier-1, and tier-2 markets.
We tested homepage variants, navigation variants, and core journeys such as NCMC, FASTag, debit card, bank account creation, and UPI.
Users already understood standalone financial apps like PhonePe, Paytm, and Google Pay. What confused them was the bank being nested inside a telco-led app.
User research patterns
“Now it looks like a bank.”
“Things are easy to find.”
“Every bank has its own app, but you don't.”
“Less confusing than the earlier app.”
A standalone Airtel Payments Bank app with:
- Bank-first homepage
- Visible balance with hide option
- Account-first hierarchy
- UPI and money actions
- Bill payments
- Transaction history
- Debit card
- FASTag
- Safe Banking
- Transparent Banking
- Fixed deposit
- Digital gold
- Rewards and offers
- Feedback surface
- Final navigation: Home / Invest / Scan / Rewards / History
The app moved from employee launch to 1% public rollout to validate stability and real-world usage before broader scale.
Homepage as business real estate.
The homepage was not designed by taste. It was designed as an operating surface.
Public construct buckets
- Trust
- Service
- Growth
- Discovery
- Brand
- Experimentation
Operating principle
Pixel per dollar.
Every module needed a customer objective and a business reason to exist: service value, trust value, discovery value, growth value, brand value, or learning value.
The homepage construct artifact should be shown here later.
Make balance the first-class anchor
The app had to feel like a bank first, not a generic UPI app. Balance visibility created the account-first hierarchy, with an option to hide it.
Prioritize self-service actions
Add money, send money, UPI, bill payments, transaction history, debit card, and FASTag needed high visibility because they represented repeated banking behavior.
Make trust visible
Safe Banking and Transparent Banking were surfaced as visible trust modules, not hidden inside settings.
Control growth real estate
Growth modules had to earn their space through the homepage construct instead of becoming random banners.
Design for discovery
NCMC, FASTag, debit card, and account creation were journeys users struggled to find inside ThanksApp, so the standalone app had to make them easier to discover.
Keep both apps coherent
Because ThanksApp and the standalone app would coexist, the experience had to account for routing, deep links, SMS/email links, UPI behavior, and user expectations across two apps.
Before
- Open Airtel ThanksApp
- Land in telco-led super-app
- Find Money / banking section
- Enter bank experience
- Search for banking product
- Limited discovery and cross-sell control
After
- Open Airtel Payments Bank App
- Bank-first homepage
- Visible balance and self-service actions
- Discover NCMC / FASTag / debit card / account creation
- See trust modules
- Complete banking journeys inside a focused app
The Airtel Payments Bank app
The consumer payments and banking experience, end to end.
- Research
- 60-70 users across rural, tier-1, and tier-2 markets.
- Research method
- Moderated usability testing, task-based testing, prototype testing, field research, interviews, concept testing, and competitor comparison.
- Core journeys tested
- UPI, NCMC, FASTag, debit card, bank account creation, bill payments, transaction history, fixed deposit, digital gold, Safe Banking, Transparent Banking.
- Rollout
- Employee launch followed by 1% public rollout.
Primary success signals
- App installs
- Uninterrupted usage
- Low/no critical bugs
- Users finding core journeys easily
- Core journey funnels benchmarked against ThanksApp
1% rollout learning
- Stability was good with minor issues
- Homepage engagement looked promising
- Users discovered more products
- Feedback quality was useful
- Funnels were still being benchmarked against the mature ThanksApp experience
The business case showed meaningful upside, but also required new app operations, phased migration, and parallel running costs.
As Head of Product Design, I was involved from the 'should this app exist?' stage.
- Evaluating the pros and cons of separating from ThanksApp
- Framing the customer experience and discovery problem
- Leading research across rural, tier-1, and tier-2 markets
- Testing homepage, navigation, and journey mockups
- Defining design principles for a bank-first app
- Shaping homepage real-estate strategy
- Partnering with product, design, engineering, research, analytics, growth, security, and compliance
- Helping move the app from strategy to employee launch and 1% public rollout