What was the scope of their involvement?
They helped us rewrite our frontend and backend which we launched in 2014. It was a full rewrite of our online banking. At the time, users could go into a really simplistic website, pay bills, transfer money, edit future date of payment, and that was about it. There was no personalization to the website at all, and it was not modern by any sense of the word.
The work that ROSSUL did was help us create a more personalized experience, so users could see their own user profile, upload images of themselves, see images of their financial advisor, which we call “coaches” at Libro. They could more intuitively do all the payments and money transfers that they required.
ROSSUL wasn’t tasked to create any new money movement functionality in any way. That’s not necessarily their job. It was really to make the features that we already had more intuitive. They reworked all the processes that the user was using. More recently, we decided to rewrite our mobile banking, as well, for consistency’s sake and because we were very pleased with the work of ROSSUL. We just launched that in the last two months.
Eli is the main stakeholder there and seems to do most of the design work. I know that they have a developer that I don’t believe is in the country. I believe the partner is situated somewhere else. I believe he has a couple designers, as well. With the mobile work, he introduced us to three new designers. One started off as kind of an intern and helped us do the user experience testing, who also ended up doing some design work, as well. When they worked on the first project, they had a user experience tester as well, at the time, which he contracted out for our project.
How did you come to work with ROSSUL?
I believe we originally stumbled across them through Google AdWords. We liked that they were local and we explored their website to see their previous work. At the time, we were slightly crunched, because we had tried to do the work internally at first. We were at a time where, without changing our launch date, we couldn’t go through an RFP process. We reached out to ROSSUL and got them to do a quote for us and pitch us without looking at anybody else. We did some reference checks on them and were satisfied with what we saw. We were also satisfied with their work.
In between the two projects, we did have the opportunity to work with some other providers, and it created more confidence in our liking for ROSSUL versus some other partners that we’ve used in the past. We like their methodology and their ability to stay on time.
Sometimes I find, internally, you can have this opinion that challenges your designers to step out of their comfort zone and not really do what they think is right, or not really have any kind of scientific backing, but ROSSUL has really pushed us to let the process work. We liked that, and it improved the results.
How much have you invested with ROSSUL?
We’ve spent between $300,000 and $350,000 on the two projects.
What is the status of this engagement?
We started working with them in 2013, and the work is ongoing. They are continuing to monitor and help us modify our mobile work. We just launched that at the beginning of the last month, and so they’re still on contract with us to monitor the feedback, make any changes, and fix any bugs. We are looking to work with them for another project in the future.
Time spent on site has improved dramatically since the engagement began, while bounce rates have dropped. ROSSUL accepted constructive input well, but also brought creative ideas to the table at a reasonable value. Their consistent communication and responsiveness made them a valuable partner.