Turning PandaPay wallet into FREE money

Influencing Leadership and Product through Design.

Problem

In the Philippines, half of orders were paid in cash and 3% by wallet; the organisation believed it was an awareness problem.

Role

A design-led initiative that I started. I secured sign-off from the VP after two levels had declined, and led the design across Berlin and Singapore.

Scope

23 stakeholders, two offices, two designers directed, two markets researched.

Result

Research overturned the diagnosis (48% knew the wallet and chose not to use it); the wallet was repositioned around money users already had, and top-up went from four steps with a 63% drop-off to one step. Handed off before user testing in Dec 2023.

Starting Point

I walked out of one meeting and into another, and the same problem was in both.

A gift card design review: the wallet was showing three separate balances and the UI couldn't hold them. Then a marketing review: the cashback campaign didn't look like a campaign. Every team owned a feature. Nobody owned the full experience.

The business case was clear: collecting cash from riders is expensive, especially in high-inflation markets where the money loses value every day. In the Philippines, 50% of users paid with cash and only 3% used the wallet, yet wallet users were 3x more likely to place additional orders. Converting cash users wasn't just a UX problem; it was an operational one.

But the wallet's own checkout presence was working against it: PandaPay's offer sat beneath the payment method as four lines of text and a Switch link. Available credit, cashback, and gift card balance, stacked, with a warning that ₱20 would expire in 24 hours. Too much, in the wrong place.

The legacy experience: checkout with PandaPay's offer buried under Cash, the wallet stacking three separate balances, and a gift card list with expiry warnings — Before

Getting buy-in

Our users spend 20 minutes to place an order; the last thing they want is friction at any touchpoint.

I took it to my manager: turned down. Then to hers: turned down again. Then our VP visited the Berlin office. I pitched him in person, sign-off came the same day, and by the next morning a cross-office task force was standing between Berlin and Singapore.

Hypotheses

Cash wasn't mostly a preference. It was a recovery path.

CX reports: access declined. App analytics: didn't exist. I looked at Tableau data instead. Four findings stood out:

2.43×

attempts per order on average. The intent to order was never missing.

₱700+

average order value, against a ₱380 average meal. They were ordering in groups.

3DS

was the second most common reason a payment failed. Group orders get paid on someone else's card, and the verification code goes to a phone that isn't in the room.

~17%

of cash users had already moved to GCash, which was taking 29% of payments. When cash users do go digital, they go to someone else's wallet.

They were ordering in groups, paying on someone else's card, failing a 3DS challenge sent to a phone that wasn't in the room, and falling back to cash.

I didn't go to Manila. My questions did.

Our main focus was the Philippines, and the research team was already heading out for field study. I took what the numbers had told me and got additional questions into the field guide before the researcher left. When she came back, we prepared two surveys from what she'd found and ran them across the Philippines and Malaysia, then sat down with users in both markets directly.

About a quarter had never heard of the wallet. That was the smaller half of the problem.

~23%

had never heard of the wallet. Brand awareness was the smaller half of the problem.

41%

never used the cashback they had earned. The money was already there, and invisible.

The research closed with four archetypes

The research closed with four archetypes:

Vigilant Skeptic

Prefers cash out of habit, spending control, and security reasons.

Savvy Saver

Pays digitally and scrapes the app for vouchers, cashbacks, and offers.

Group Leader

Could be cash or digital. Cares about convenience the most.

PandaPro Devotee

Aims for a “premium experience” and wants to feel well-treated.

Changing The Room

Two workshops, Berlin and Singapore: same wall, different reads

I had the room answer for itself before it saw anything I had found. Rather than present findings, I had stakeholders do three exercises.

Tell a story: invent a user and describe what motivates their choice of payment
Write a tweet: 140 characters explaining what PandaPay is to the world
Describe competitors: each one's positioning in adjectives. Their answers went on the wall first.

The three workshop exercises: Tell a story, Write a tweet, and Describe competitors, with example answers on the wall — The three exercises the room answered before seeing any of the research.

Stakeholders believed it was an awareness problem. The research said otherwise.

Then I showed the research. The data told a different story: 48% had heard of the wallet and chose not to use it. 41% had cashback sitting in their wallet and never touched it. The problem wasn't that people couldn't find PandaPay; it was that PandaPay hadn't earned its place.

This reframe changed the project's direction. Instead of louder campaigns and better placement, the question became: what would make the wallet worth choosing over cash, every time?

Solution

The repositioning: from “another payment method” to “FREE money”

Checkout, three states: the ₱915 balance invitation, the saved-₱915 confirmation, and the balance and cash remainder as two clear rows — The checkout invites the shopper to spend the ₱915 already in their balance, then confirms what they saved.

Most users got money in their wallets from a cashback or refund, yet 41% never used it. Nobody was going to top up their account just to get food. The plan was to associate PandaPay with free money: promote the money they already have, and use the same space for campaigns to establish the connection.

The redesigned checkout and payment-method sheets: cashback and top-up offers sit where the decision happens

The three balances: Users need to know how much they can spend at a glance; we don't need hangry users doing accounting. The redesign led with total available balance, with the ability to dive into each pot (credit, cashback, gift card) individually. And for Vigilant Skeptics, it addressed their number one concern: security.

The redesigned wallet: one total available balance up front, and a security-first empty state, Safe from the first peso — One total balance up front, and for the Vigilant Skeptic, security addressed before anything else. Each pot then dives one level deeper (credit, cashback, gift card) without doing accounting at the top.

Diving into one pot: the PandaPay balance with its recent transactions, animated — One total balance up front, and for the Vigilant Skeptic, security addressed before anything else. Each pot then dives one level deeper (credit, cashback, gift card) without doing accounting at the top.

Topping up took four steps and lost 63% on the way

The legacy four-step top-up: enter an amount of ₱750, confirm the Visa payment method, review and confirm on a bottom sheet, then a receipt — Before

One tap, from the screen you were already on

The redesigned top-up: the wallet home with one available balance of ₱1,291.22, a half-sheet adding ₱700 via GCash, and the balance updated to ₱1,991.22 — After

Handoff

What I left behind

I left the Delivery Hero fintech team in December 2023, before this work reached user testing. The repositioning, the research, the archetypes, and the redesigned flows were handed off to the team in Singapore to carry forward.

The hardest design problems on this project weren't visual; they were political. The wallet wasn't failing because of bad UI. It was failing because the organization had settled on a diagnosis that the data didn't support, and nobody had challenged it. The work that mattered most happened in a dinner conversation, in a research debrief, and on a workshop wall, not in Figma.