Discover the team behind PeoPay KIDS app by Bank Pekao

Parents can never start too early in teaching their children the fundamentals of money. Bank Pekao has recently launched a new PeoPay KIDS app that will introduce children to the essentials of money management. The app provides a wide range of functions for kids, with account balance and history, transfers, top-ups, and a savings management tool. Kids that use the app will also be provided with their own, dedicated PeoPay KIDS card that is linked to their account. Beyond providing the essential money tools, Bank Pekao has developed virtual coaches that will provide guided messages, hints, and education about how to intelligently manage finances.

After conducting interviews with parents and children, the bank realized there was an opportunity to create an offering specifically for children. They then set up an interdisciplinary team tasked with building the new application and product. After months of design and testing, the application was released on both Google Play and the Apple App Store. This initiative is the result of extensive research and work done at Bank Pekao’s innovation lab (Learn more about PeoPay KIDS app)

Let’s take a look at the team from the lab who developed this impressive new app and how they approached this project.

Bartosz Zborowski

Bartosz is the Head of Innovation and Payments Department at Bank Pekao, responsible for digital and mobile banking, the Innovation LAB, and omnichannel platform. From the beginning of his professional career, he has participated in numerous projects related to the use of modern technologies in finance and banking.

During the PeoPay Kids project, Bartosz’s role was to inspire the team with such an ambitious challenge, to organize the necessary resources, and to supervise the overall implementation. PeoPay KIDS was the first Pekao product created using completely new methodology from their Innovation LAB, which undertook the task of designing this solution on the basis of modern design thinking methods and unique methodology of creating innovation with significant involvement of potential users.

Agnieszka Jaworska

Agnieszka is a Project Manager in the Retail Customer Applications Department at Bank Pekao. She has over eight years of experience in team management, projects portfolio, and triple constraint of project scope, budget and timelines. Using her experience in IT and banking, she is continuously working on planning and supervising the execution of mobile applications development from gathering business requirements to release in application store and maintenance.

Agnieszka’s team developed a web application for parents and PeoPay KIDS, the first native mobile application in the Pekao Bank. One of the key achievements in PeoPay KIDS was creating a safe and interactive mechanism that teaches children how to use banking in a friendly way. Her team used agile scrum methodology as one of the most commonly used and efficient practices in project management.

Michał Ornatowski

Michał is an experienced project manager with over 15 years of experience in banking. During his work, he carried out numerous projects aimed at providing new products, services and experiences for clients (both external and internal). Starting from CRM systems, through the development of mobile payments (HCE, BLIK, Apple Pay), to the development of mobile banking applications.

Creating a new comprehensive product for a new group of bank customers – children - required many arrangements (formal, product and technical) and taking into account many, often divergent, needs and requirements of the bank's units. The main challenge of the PeoPay KIDS project was the appropriate selection and coordination of a team with different competences and experience, and using various work methodologies. The success in the form of achieving the best effect ensured not losing the perspective of the client - the child and his parent by placing each team member as a potential recipient of the prepared solution.

Iwona Mugda

Iwona has worked in banking industry for over 16 years. Firstly, was responsible mainly for payments products, and then moved to mobile app area. She was a part of a Millennium Bank team that built an innovative smart shopping platform called Goodie. In 2018 she joined Bank Pekao and started building PeoPay KIDS.

For Iwona, one significant challenge was putting yourself in the role of the recipient of the service. On the one hand, a child aged 6-13 who will be a user of the solution and on the other hand, the parent to whom the product will de facto be sold. During many studies among children, which were carried out at various stages of the project, it clearly turned out that what is liked by adults does not fully meet the expectations and tastes of children. So we had to strike the perfect balance between the two.

Marcin Stańczykowski

Marcin is a Project Manager in PeoPay KIDS project team in the Innovation and Payments Department at Bank Pekao. He has been in the banking industry over 15 years, specializing in sales support, customer service, sales processes and mobile banking. At Bank Pekao, he has worked on the introduction of Apple Pay and BLIK payments in the PeoPay mobile banking app. For two years he has been the Product Manager of Parent Panel introduced on three separate platforms, all developed in Bank Pekao from scratch: PeoPay mobile banking application, Pekao24 internet banking service, and Pekao360 omnichannel sales and service platform.

A big challenge was the innovation and complexity of the project concerning the finances of young children aged 6-13 as well as the synchronization with the implementation of the Parent Panel along with completely new electronic banking services. At the same time, they wanted to keep processes and functionality as simple as possible, so that parents had a clear preview of the most important information at a glance and the ability to manage all aspects of their child's finances. Last but not least, they had a goal to go live with the PeoPay KIDS offer just a few days before 1st of July - widely celebrated The Children's Day.

Michał Szewczyk

Michał is responsible for innovation design, prototyping, and testing new products and services. In the past, he used to work as a consultant helping his partners implement innovation, create growth strategies, build new products, and design or transform user and customer experience. Michał is also passionate about agile projects and trend analysis.

The main challenge for Michał was understanding how a child perceives the world. Leaving behind the common ‘adult’ understanding of the world of finance, the team had to recreate the artifacts and mechanisms that are a part of the child’s routine, such as receiving pocket money or saving it in a piggy bank. Also, the user research process itself turned out to be a challenge since the team had to communicate with soon-to-be users and their parents. Rarely does it happen to work on a project that combines banking-related and children-oriented details – but that may be one of the most interesting use cases in service design for banking. As a designer, you have to be flexible and empathize with a user more than ever.

Nela Figlarz-Leszczyńska

Nela has been a member of the Innovation Lab at Bank Pekao SA since the beginning in 2018. Her expertise is an innovation design and testing, with a background in insights, inspiration, and user research in banking and beyond.

Her role in the project was user research, inspiration and trend analysis, market research, conceptualizing, and testing the solution with children and their parents. The main challenge she encountered during the process was a huge discrepancy between the researchers’ idea of children’s needs and the actual needs. What the team needed to do was design a banking ecosystem for a new type of customer from scratch. Contrary to what you may expect, creating a banking app for children is so much more than making the regular app more colorful and playful.