Get Cash offers customers an easy fix for lost or forgotten cards. A way to quickly send money to family or friends in need, or a choice of leaving their wallets at home in favour of their mobile phones. Get Cash solves this in a totally secure and painless way for the first time anywhere.

The opportunity was to serve the huge number of people who leave the house only to find they’ve left their debit card behind. Also, it was obvious from our research that people actually preferred to take fewer items out in case something gets lost, but the one thing they will always remember is their smartphone. This posed a great opportunity for NatWest to prove its “Helpful Banking” brand ethos and innovate with a solution to the inconvenience of leaving a card at home.

Research showed that a subset of customers were using the bank’s Emergency Cash telephony service with great frequency. The security team thought it was so alarming they suspected a hack of some sort. Research painted another story however.

Younger customers were using Emergency Cash in unintended ways. In some cases they were choosing to leave their cards behind as a cost-savings step before a night out with friends. That insight gave us all the reason we needed to suggest a pivot to the bank.

With Emergency Cash a customer would call the bank, get a special code over the air from a phone centre rep, and then the bank would terminate the card and issue a new one. Each of those steps were a cost to the bank. We also saw an opportunity to shift the context away from fearful emergency scenarios and instead focus the experience around Natwest’s “Helpful Banking” ethos.

With Get Cash, you choose the amount of cash you would like to withdraw from within the app. You’re then provided with a one-use-only secure code that can be used within three hours at any one of more than 8,000 NatWest, RBS, or Tesco ATMs in the UK. As well as designing and building the app’s intuitive front-end, we also had to deal with the complexity of creating a unique use-once PIN that’s recognised across multiple-brand ATMs and connects back to legacy banking technology.

£22m

in Get Cash requests in the first year.

500,000+

Get Cash requests during the same period.

100%

cost savings per transaction for the bank

2013

Cannes Gold Lion for Mobile

Role

Global Creative Director, Experience Design

Skills

Creative Direction, UX Design, Interaction Design, Information Architecture, Strategy, UX Research, Branding & Identity, Staff Leadership & Development

Team

Jen Heazlewood, Kin Cheung

Agency / Launch

SapientNitro / 2012