The challenge

Sky Betting and Gaming was mandated (by UK gambling commission) to prohibit users from using credit cards to gamble by 14 of April 2020.

I helped the business to...

• position and communicate the message to the users on the products
• understand users's level of comprehension and reaction to the message

It's worth adding that previously Sky Betting and Gaming had evaluated the behaviour of ~10% of the user base who use credit cards and concluded that they don't have high risk behaviour compared with those who use other payment options. For that reason, usage of credit card wasn't limited historically.

The approach

This piece of work was the result of a collaboration between many parts of the business (named below) working together in a 'working group' in which I was a contributor. I was close to the Payment squad which was responsible for making product changes.

Me & Payment Squad

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3rd-Party Platform Provider

I advocated for messaging ahead of the implementation with maximum possible exposure. The reason is that adding money to an account is one of the most fundamental part of key user journeys on our products and it could easily cause frustration.

The plan was to sequentially and gradually...

• Not allow users to add credit cards (February 2020)
• Not allowing users to add money using credit cards (April 2020)
• Not allowing users to withdraw money to credit cards (September 2020)

The output

I mapped out the proposed journeys based on the product changes we discussed in the payment squad. These changes were planned to be implemented hand-in-hand with emails and push notifications (managed by other parts of the business) sent to the customers .

These diagrams helped us boil the potential solutions down to its simplest possible form.

Iteration 1

We came up with the solution below to show different messages and prompts for different segments of our customer base.

Evaluative research

🔍 I usability tested (remote moderated sessions) the boiled-down solution with user to measure the following...

1. If people noticed the messages
2. how they reacted to them (sentiment & action taken)
3. their level of comprehension

Research findings

Off the back of the these insights, we iterated and improved the content before going live.

The outcome

For this piece of work, success meant...

• users switching from credit cards to debit cards / Google Pay / Apple Pay with debit cards behind them.
• users not deciding to leave our products because of a bad experience
• users wouldn't need to contact customer service to understand what's happened and what to do

According to the survey sent to lapsed (aka churned) customers of Sky Bet (1 Feb – 30 Apr 2020), only 1% said unavailability of credit card was the reason for stopping using Sky Bet.

The expected impact of banning credit cards was estimated to be very similar across most of competition. This was based on a piece of research done by the market research team.

Market research also showed that Sky Bet did a much better job of raising awareness about the upcoming changes and helping customers to change their behaviour. This impact was achieved because of the content changes in product and the email campaigns.