RejaReja Wallet Adoption RejaReja Wallet Adoption

How might we encourage merchants to build up a balance in their Reja Reja digital wallet and use it to make transactions?

RejaReja teamed up with IDEO through their design accelerator program to conduct research and gain insights into how we could increase adoption of their wallet in the markets they serve, starting with Uganda.

Research

IDEO's research team worked with us for a month to study ways to increase the adoption of the RejaReja wallet as a payment solution by both customers and merchants. Through this research, we learned that:

  1. High transaction costs on digital platforms, such as sending, receiving, and withdrawing funds, can be a major barrier to adoption. These fees can significantly eat into the margins of merchants, making it difficult for them to turn a profit.
  2. Low smartphone penetration, long USSD flows, and lack of infrastructure make digital payment slower and less convenient than cash. This lack of a seamless experience hinders adoption of digital payment.
  3. Merchants are hesitant to use digital money due to fear of funds being locked up. They look for accessible cash on and off ramps to trust new digital payment systems.

Our Focus

Through the research we decided to design around the following areas:

  1. Educating merchants on transaction costs
  2. Make it easy for them to perform tasks that help them increase revenue
  3. Emphasizing the simplicity of loading and unloading funds from their wallets
  4. Celebrating and incentivising transactions

Educating merchants on transaction costs

During the design phase we explored ways of educating merchants on transaction cost by introducing informational banners at key points within the user journey. Some of the places we introduced these were:

  1. Wallet dashboard - we highlighted that topping up one’s wallet was free of charge
  2. Top Up module - we seperated methods of transaction into zero charge channels and transaction charged channels whilst showing the fees incurred with each channel
  3. Withdrawal module

Making it easy for them to perform tasks that help increase revenue

We made it easy to perform specific tasks that matter to them like buying goods, selling DFS and accessing BNPL features. This was done by:

  1. Wallet dashboard - added a section that provides shortcuts to buying goods, selling DFS and BNPL for new users and for proficient users, we added shortcuts to send money, buy airtime and pay bills
  2. Providing payment options during checkout

Emphasizing the simplicity of loading and unloading funds from their wallets

We also needed to show merchants how easy it was to load and unload their wallets at anytime. We did this by showing them all the cash in and cash out channels within the application as well as relevant costs attached to each channel

Future considerations/explorations

  1. Building to support non-MF supplier payments to digitise all stock related payments for merchants
  2. Expanding use cases to recurring payments for merchants like school fee, P2P, electricity etc.