Why Anna Money took a design-led approach to transforming business accounting

Singh has spent much of his career launching and running design businesses, which means he has experienced the agony of navigating business accounting and tax. Crucially, he still thinks like a designer, so he endeavored to resolve these issues through product development with customer service wrapped around it when co-founding Anna Money in 2018.

Customer service in banking, as Singh sees it, has nose-dived – and this is why. In the past, going to a bank branch to resolve problems by speaking with a member of staff gave high customer satisfaction. Then came phoning a branch, then a call center, then an overseas call center and today, customers communicate with chatbots.

“We really are in what I call the pit of despair or the ninth circle of hell because nobody gets a good experience and customer service is now governed by new technologies that make organizations think that they’re delivering a good service but they’re not if the customer is getting a really raw deal.

“As the customer, you have to listen to things such as, ‘We understand the problem,’ but they can’t actually help, which is very frustrating, of course.”

This status quo motivated the company to create a chat function that seamlessly blends human and AI help. The idea is that it would be imperceptible to customers, who would also be able to speak to someone whenever they requested.

“When you’re chatting within the Anna app, there’s always a customer service agent there available, but the majority of questions get answered by our AI, which has been trained on customer interactions since the beginning.

“It now understands over 80% of customer intent, which is hugely important if you’re dealing with people doing things such as sending invoices,” says Singh, who adds, “We’re not reliant on AI, though, which is the problem with a lot of chatbots.” There’s also a chat function called Tax Terrapin, which is trained on a separate language model to answer tax queries.

Beyond chat, AI is working on its other favored function, the boring stuff. In this case, it has been designed into the product’s functionality and takes care of things such as bookkeeping, tax returns and invoice chasing.

“We increasingly see Anna as a personal assistant and we want the service to do all those complex things for you and increasingly for those things to be done in the background, while also building trust with customers,” says Singh.

Anna, which operates in the UK but is moving into other territories including Australia, does rate very highly when you look at Trust Pilot, for example. Singh says: “Our customer retention levels are incredibly high. People join us and stay with us and that’s a testament to the way the product has been designed, the way the technology works and then the way we deliver support and guidance for people who need it.”

Design thinking is at the heart of the business and product developments are being worked on by blended teams. The starting point for projects is “looking at the data to see where there are consistent problems […or being informed by] customer service agents and engineers,” says Singh, who reveals that a lot of projects are begun by “looking at which customer satisfaction levels we can build further as that’s where you retain customers and the service improves.”

The design team is headed by Andy Moore, the design director and head of product, who works with around 10 UX and product designers, engineers and AI specialists. A separate customer service team of 40 people and a total staff of around 120 people are also involved.

Given that the functionality of Anna is built around dealing with tax and accounting efficiency, the design language of the product needed to be fun. Anna, by the way, stands for Absolutely No-Nonsense Admin. When it launched its contactless debit card users soon found out that a payment tap would emit a miaow on their phone.

NB Studio designed the visual identity for the company’s launch, working alongside Michael Wolff. Wolff has a rich history of working on animal-based identities, and in this case, illustrator Alice Bowsher was brought in to create a whole menagerie of them.

“We do keep our comms quite lighthearted and fun,” says Singh, “but I’m also a big believer that whenever you market something, it’s got to reflect the actual product because we’re dealing with something practical. There’s a product truth in our marketing, so people know what they’re going to get.”

For Singh, the future of business accounting is that customers won’t have to think about anything other than getting on with running their business when using the service. “The product can only improve and we’ll spend more development money on making the services people really need better by automating them to the point that customers have to do a lot less.”