Travelex boosts sales conversion by double digits in under 6 months, thanks to a new app
Nearform partnership delivers an enhanced customer experience
Travelex promises to make travel money safe, secure and simple for its customers. But what happens when that promise is at risk because of technology rapidly becoming outdated? Travelex faced these circumstances, and took action by creating a new Travel Money Card app. It was just one element of an enterprise-wide transformation focused not only on enhancing technology, but also on improving customer experience.
A team of Travelex and Nearform experts designed, developed and launched a new app — prioritising superior user experience, greater reliability and smarter design. The end-to-end process was completed in less than six months, resulting in a double-digit increase in sales conversions and a marked reduction in top-up failures.
“The impact Travelex has achieved at speed with Nearform is phenomenal. We’ve given our users a mobile experience that is founded on customer and data insight, leading to a significant boost in customer top-ups. It shows what can happen when innovative leadership is combined with a technical partner that designs, architects and engineers great digital products.” Stuart Adams — Director of Product, Travelex
An app that had become unstable
The last thing anyone wants when they’re abroad for a holiday or business trip is to have issues making payments. It’s incredibly frustrating. But reliability issues were creeping in for app users. The app was increasingly unable to support Travelex’s growth agenda, with many customers using the product for just their first trip. In a competitive market, this was far from ideal.
Unfortunately, most improvements for the app were limited to quick fixes. And even when changes were possible, technical debt prevented strategic long-term success and stability of future updates. A new app and fresh thinking about how to best serve customers was needed. Travelex turned to Nearform to make this happen.
Taking a bold step to embrace a customer-first approach
Travelex’s executive team understood the company needed to make fundamental people, process and technology improvements if it was to give its customers the experience they demanded and deserved.
They identified two options for achieving this. One, they could take a conservative approach, patching up issues individually as they arose, and overall maintain their existing way of doing things. Or two, they could take a bold step toward embracing a new approach across its enterprise aimed at fully unlocking the power of digital to serve its customers. They took the second option.
The transformation instigated a shift from two siloed teams working in native code to a single team working on a cross-platform approach. React Native was chosen as the framework for this move to a single codebase, as it meant Travelex could get maximum impact from its investment.
Adopting this customer-first approach would require an architecture that could enable Travelex to scale significantly year-on-year. It would introduce a design foundation that allowed Travelex to unite its iOS and Android developers in one team, increasing their efficiency and ensuring consistency across all platforms.
Strong leadership and culture positions Travelex for success
Nearform's cross-functional discovery process kickstarted Travelex and Nearform’s joint effort to rapidly align on the key outcomes, objectives, risks and priorities — ensuring every technical decision had a business case supporting it. The path ahead included clearing inherited technical debt, accelerating deployment, implementing a robust testing framework and improving user experience.
Travelex’s senior leaders empowered the project team to be autonomous and make quick, ground-up decisions on technology and architecture whilst respecting the company’s future ambitions. One of those key decisions was to maximise team efficiency and address one of the biggest concerns of release confidence in the existing app by investing upfront in automation.
The initial focus was on automating the full build, signing and release process of the app, which allowed the team to effortlessly push the app to iOS and Android app stores as well as the testing platform. The test engineers focused on creating a comprehensive automated test and regression suite to allow for a high level of confidence in ongoing feature releases, and save time for the development team.
The app’s system and architecture were built with scalability in mind. This future-proofing approach ensures the app will scale to seamlessly meet the needs of Travelex’s business — it enables the company to support new B2C and B2B2C customers and move into new markets without issue.
Nearform’s approach helped position Travelex for long-term success by focusing on business impact considerations as part of any technical decision, coaching its team on engineering best practices and enhancing their end-to-end delivery capability. The company can now release any day versus every fortnight before.
“Nearform has been a true partner to Travelex in the journey of rebuilding our app and accelerating our transformation journey as an organisation. They embedded with our team, and took ownership to help build a product with the agility, scalability and resilience needed to ensure it brings enduring value to our customers.” Stuart Adams — Director of Product, Travelex
A giant leap forward
Travelex launched the new Travel Money Card app less than six months after the transformation effort commenced, introducing numerous benefits:
“Our mission is to simplify our customers’ access to international money, however and whenever. Our new app is a significant milestone in this journey, strongly evidenced by early user feedback and our key metrics.” Dipen Nagda — Global Head of Product, Travelex
Users of the app provided excellent feedback:
Our impact
Double-digit boost in conversion rate
The app is easier and quicker to use, leading to a jump in customer sales conversion.
Marked decrease in top-up failures
The app is significantly more reliable, with top-up failures dropping significantly.
Beating the industry crash rate gold standard
The app now has a crash-free rate of 99.8% — 0.3% higher than the industry gold standard and an improvement of 3% versus the previous app.
Our capabilities
ENGINEERING
Building the app’s system and architecture with scalability in mind
Creating a comprehensive automated test and regression suite
Coaching Travelex’s team on engineering best practices
Enhancing end-to-end delivery capability
DESIGN
Introducing a design foundation that allowed Travelex to unite its iOS and Android developers in one team
Insight, imagination and expertly engineered solutions to accelerate and sustain progress.
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