How our methodology has evolved
Since we launched the first Pulse awards, a lot has changed.
This time last year we were a fairly small team of researchers and editors with a simple platform. In January 2018, the inaugural Pulse awards gathered together the 11 best user journeys across areas including marketplace banking, FX, and product release rate.
Things are a bit different now. The Pulse team has tripled in size and the platform now has a full-time product team releasing new features at a rate of knots. There are now more than 2,000 recordings of the leading banking and fintech journeys, and we’re adding more than 50 journeys every single week.
To ensure that our users are able to find the most valuable journeys in this firehose of content, we developed a brand new ratings framework that ranks every journey on three metrics: utility, usability, and visual design. This framework was designed to distil the expertise of the 11:FS UX people, designers, and product managers.
So what does this mean for the annual Pulse awards?
This time around upcoming winners will be picked using our new ratings framework in combination with the opinions of the 11:FS research team. Based on the market trends of the year, we’ve also chosen a new set of six categories for the awards:
- Best incumbent strategy
- Onboarding
- One to watch
- Best advertising campaign
- Design
- Best US disruptor
These categories are reflective of the changes in the fintech and banking landscape. We’ve continued to see a huge amount of interest in ‘Onboarding’ throughout the year, with third-party vendors like Onfido going from strength to strength, so this is one of the categories which we chose to carry over from 2017. Conversely, the growth in incumbent activity in response to the challenger banks and the increased amount of advertising spend from the world’s fintechs has warranted the creation of new categories this time around.
We have already begun the process of skimming off the highest rated journeys to compare the leading financial services brands against each other.
Watch this space for the full set of winners and runners-up! And if you're curious which brands perform better than others, go to 11:FS Pulse.