CLIENT

Weyay, NBK

ROLE

Design Director

AGENCY

R/GA

YEAR

2021-2022

Kuwait's first digital bank

A banking experience empowering the next generation of Kuwait.

R/GA partnered with the National Bank of Kuwait (NBK) to create the country’s very first fully-digital bank. Built from the ground up, the ambition of Weyay was to build a world-class banking experience for young Kuwaitis.

The result is a modern, flexible, visual, and verbal identity. The name Weyay (‘with me’) was selected to reflect NBK’s personalised approach to digital banking, and the logo was created to signify progression and growth.

Weyay’s brand identity is brought to life through unique features, initially launching with fast digital onboarding, fully digital account management, and allowance transfer (young citizens receive a regular allowance from the state). In later releases, differentiators such as quick P2P payments, savings pots and goals, bills split, and integrated brand partnerships will also go live.

As the country’s first fully digital bank, Weyay’s suite of financial services is built to help young people feel empowered to manage their finances and feel supported in making decisions. The app is available in both English and Arabic.

NOTE

As only a limited number of Weyay's features have been publicly released, this case study doesn't yet portray the full extent of the project.

Role and collaboration

After the brand foundation and vision of the app were created by R/GA, a collaborative product development process was engaged with the NBK internal team. I joined the team during this phase, overseeing all visual design aspects of Weyay.

Key features were designed during three-week sprints with an intimate partnership between R/GA and NBK’s team in Kuwait. As this was during the pandemic, much of this was managed through remote working. The approach included close cooperation with NBK’s development partners in Poland.

The creation of new illustrations and animation, that strengthened the brand identity, was developed in parallel.

After the production sprint phase, our R/GA team assisted in further refinements and additional features. A transitional engagement was undertaken to accommodate the ultimate handover from R/GA to the NBK team to run the project independently. Through knowledge-share workshops and practices, a workflow and design process was developed to support the team.

Now the NBK team has what they need to grow and nurture Weyay into the future.

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Launch campaign video

To kickstart the Weyay launch campaign we created a teaser video. This was the opportunity to reveal the brand as well as the digital bank’s unique features. The goal was to drive registration sign-up.

My role as Design Director was to storyboard the video and work closely with the animation and production studio to bring it to life. The challenge was to connect an audience with an entirely digital product that hadn’t yet been fully built. What’s more, we could only highlight the rather limited features that would be available in the initial product release.

The result was overwhelming, with the number of customer registrations far outperforming the business target.