Case study / CX strategy & research
The feature worked. Getting into the account did not.
Field research with Ecuadorian migrants in New York and New Jersey, on why a remittance product built for them was not reaching them.
Understand why a remittance product built for Ecuadorian migrants was not being adopted
UX designer and UX researcher, digital remittances
Judy Ajila and Isabela Muñoz, Negocios Digitales y Medios de Pago
Account access, self funding, and remittances from the United States to Ecuador; fieldwork in New York and New Jersey
Depth interviews, contextual observation, usability testing, activation events, ideation workshop
The work reframed the priority from acquisition to account recovery. Two journeys and a prioritised set of improvements were documented; current metrics are unavailable.
01 / Context
A product that solved the right problem, and sat unused.
Banco Pichincha had already built remittances into its mobile banking app. Someone in the United States could send money home through a link and an in app flow, without walking into a remittance agency, without carrying cash, and without waiting on someone else's opening hours.
That mattered. Sending through an agency meant queues, fees, travel, and for some people money that never arrived at all.
Account openings abroad and link usage told us it was not being adopted. They could not tell us why.
02 / Research
Surveys gave us numbers. We needed the reasons.
From Ecuador we had run surveys against our own customer base. That told us what was happening without telling us why. To understand a product that was not reaching the people it was built for, we had to go to where those people actually live and work.
I travelled to New York and New Jersey and ran the study in Queens, Long Island, and across the river, in the neighbourhoods with the largest Ecuadorian communities.
Alongside the interviews I observed account activations in person, sat with the team running them, and closed the study with an ideation workshop to turn findings into proposals. I mapped two journeys: the migrant's, and the frontline team's.
03 / Insights
The barrier was never the transfer. It was the account.
People were not avoiding the feature because they preferred an agency. They were avoiding it because they could not get into their own account, and because the bank had no visible address in their new life.
Access breaks first
People change phone numbers when they arrive and lose their mobile banking with it. Many arrive without identity documents. Many do not know the code the bank asks them for.
They want the old account back
Almost nobody was asking to open something new. They were asking to recover and reactivate what they already had.
Trust is the real currency
Holding money in a United States account carries a risk that has nothing to do with banking. That fear shapes where people are willing to keep what they earn.
Support has no address
There was no direct way to reach Ecuador to recover access. Solving one problem often meant travelling to several places.
The bank was not legible
The information points in New York and New Jersey were not visible and did not read as the bank. People expected a branch like the ones they knew at home.
Digital is not a given
A meaningful share of this audience does not use digital services confidently. A flow that assumes fluency excludes them.
04 / Strategic implications
The team on the ground carried the whole service.
Mapping the migrant journey only explained half of it. The other half belonged to the small team representing the bank in the United States, who were the single point of contact for customers spread across several states.
They covered activation, support, sales, and follow up at once, travelling long distances between remittance agencies and activation points, reachable by phone and message at any hour. When systems were down, activations stopped with them.
Seeing that clearly changed the proposals. Anything we designed for migrants had to reduce what this team was absorbing, not add to it.
05 / Opportunities & direction
Recovery before acquisition.
- Credential recovery and data updating treated as a primary flow rather than an exception
- Account recovery for people who already had a relationship with the bank, instead of pushing new account creation
- Debit card delivery rethought, physical and digital
- Visible information points with permanent staff, so the bank reads as present rather than temporary
- Real time support between Ecuador and the team in the United States
- Outreach through the channels people actually use, on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok rather than the channels that work in Ecuador
The study closed with an ideation workshop to move the findings into implementation, and documentation filed in the internal knowledge centre so the research outlived the visit.
06 / Measurement & reflection
The research that mattered was not the usability testing.
The tests told me where a screen failed. Sitting with people told me why the product had never had a chance. I met people who had crossed a border without documents, who had lost every digital key to their own money on the way, and who were still sending part of what they earned to a family they had not seen in years.
That is the part I carry. Designing for this audience is not a matter of simplifying a flow. It is a matter of making a bank reachable to someone whose circumstances make almost every institution unreachable.
I have since left the bank, so I cannot speak to where the numbers stand now. What I can say is that the link is easier to find in the app than it was, and that the questions we went to New York to answer are the ones the product is now built around.