Banca Mediolanum’s digital offshoot Flowe taps airfocus to improve core mobile banking app

Source: airfocus

Italian digital bank Flowe is using airfocus to improve its core mobile banking app and aid internal product management, as it seeks to establish itself as a provider of tools that facilitate a sustainable financial lifestyle for its users.

Challenger bank Flowe is a spin-off from Italian banking giant Banca Mediolanum, and focuses heavily on sustainability, including innovations such as the Flowe card made from wood sourced from sustainable forests. It has used the airfocus modular product management platform not only to enhance its core mobile banking app but also to apply a more product-centric way of working across the business.

“We build analytics for our business colleagues, reports, and data insights, and we also develop features and apps that personalises and make a smarter experience for the end-user,” explained Marco Santoni, data product manager, Flowe. “airfocus provides us with an excellent user experience. Our teams enjoy using it and have changed their working habits to accommodate airfocus, which is rare. It saves us time, was easy to integrate, and it provides us with great flexibility in the way we use it.”

Flowe had initially been looking for a roadmap tool that could integrate seamlessly with Azure DevOps, as it had been using the latter for product prioritisation, and to increase alignment between different groups of stakeholders. However, having found airfocus, the company soon realised that it could do much more to improve its overall product workflow.

Using airfocus Priority Poker, an interactive and collaborative feature to involve relevant stakeholders in prioritisation, Flowe could work much more effectively. This collaboration involves bringing people together weekly to discuss product prioritisation. Doing so brings more transparency as stakeholders can now see why priority is given, and improved efficiency, as it takes just minutes to define priorities.

airfocus also makes it easy for Flowe to get full value from its backlog of product priorities. Previously it had been easy to overlook something in an extensive list of priorities from sprints, task boards, development pipelines, and incoming requests from customers, marketing, sales, and more. But because airfocus integrates with the Flowe product backlog tool on Azure DevOps and is fully customisable, it ensures nothing is missed and time is saved.

“We have developed airfocus to be fully customisable, scalable, and modular, and it’s amazing to see such an innovative company as Flowe using that capability,” said Malte Scholz, CEO, airfocus. “Our platform is used by large enterprises and emerging start-ups alike, and for external market-facing products and internal product management just as Flowe is doing.”

Flowe was named Product of the Year for 2021 in financial services, winning the prestigious Prodotto Dell’Anno, an Italian product innovation award given exclusively from consumers’ votes. Based on customer suggestions, Flowe renewed the look and feel of the app in September 2021.

“Our mobile banking app is our core product, vital to our success, and we factor in both internal stakeholder feedback as well as customer suggestions to keep it fresh,” said Marco Santoni, data product manager, Flowe. “I would recommend airfocus to any product manager and especially to those using common development management tools like GitHub, Jira, or Azure DevOps. Looking to the future, we are seriously considering the airfocus Insights feature to centralise feedback from staff and customers into one central place.”