Beem It – Making Payments Social

Conversations about money can be awkward at the best of times, let alone chasing long overdue IOUs with cumbersome account details. Which means when it comes to shared expenses, people are often left out of pocket. Our challenge was to reimagine the way people interact with money in social situations to reduce aforementioned frictions. Our brief was to create an app that facilitates peer-to-peer transactions, but goes beyond utility alone. With a core focus on social behaviour and human interaction, we were tasked with providing a trustworthy and reliable service that was also enjoyable, rewarding and fun to use.

To reduce awkwardness and create a more social offering, we set out to design an experience which facilitated informal conversations amongst peers. To do so, we felt we needed to explore greater customisation capabilities within the design from extended payment descriptions to emoji reactions. Users can also select unique handles rather than account numbers, which offers a more humanistic and less formal take on the selection process. We also recognised the need for simplicity, familiar language and moments of unexpected delight so as to not disrupt the social interaction but fit seamlessly into everyday conversations.

By providing a functional yet fun way to easily manage shared expenses in any social format, we’ve re-imagined the way people interact with money. We’ve given our users ownership over the way they communicate - incorporating the opportunity for self-expression - which helps to dissolve social stigma associated with financial transactions. We advocate for fair social spending, assisting users to be assertive in getting back what they’re owed, in a socially cohesive, friendly manner and reward good behaviour with reaction capabilities. By removing the need for account details and sending out reminders on their behalf, we save the user from uncomfortable conversations.

In order to provide the Beem It community with an integrated solution, we continue to release new features to meet their evolving needs. These features cater to multiple transactional scenarios from earning loyalty points, to tracking expenses within social groups and transferring between their different accounts. We're also constantly improving the experience based on usage behaviour. For example, after launching our gifting feature we noticed that most people were using animations to dress up standard debt-levelling payments as opposed to ‘gifting’ as initially intended. As a result, this feature evolved into ‘stickers’ which can be attached to any regular payment.