Case study
Humlakortet
The first debit Mastercard with a loyalty model in Sweden, built on SEB embedded finance
About
Humla enhances customer offerings and increase loyalty through embedded finance
We’re a Swedish fintech startup acquired by the leading food retail group Axfood, and we’re on a mission to accelerate the development of payments and financial services that strengthen existing customer offers and increase loyalty in the Swedish food retail market.
2021
founded in
45MSEK
capital raised
Axel Johnson
majority shareholder
Stockholm
location
The opportunity
We saw a gap in the market
The Swedish payments market for customer-rewarding cards has largely focused on credit- and membership cards that can only be used in selected stores. We discovered that not all customers are interested in shopping on credit, they want to pay with the money they already have, yet they receive no rewards for doing so. This opened up an opportunity to develop a debit Mastercard, similar to a regular bank card, but one that rewards customers for using their own money.
For every 20th purchase you get a reward
The customer simply applied for the card in the app and then swished any amount easily to the card. Each purchase of SEK 50 or more gave the customer a point, when the customer had reached 20 points they were rewarded with a SEK 50 discount or SEK 50 to donate to charity. The discount could be redeemed at any of our partners, some of Sweden's biggest brands such as Åhléns, KICKS, Apohem, 7-Eleven, Pressbyrån with many more.
At Axel Johnson, we believe retail will transform more in the coming decade than it has in the past century. Tailored financial services will play a key role in the future of retail, and we are excited about what we can achieve through this partnership —especially the opportunity to thoughtfully integrate financial services into the customer experience.
Sara Öhrvall
Chairman of the Board, Humla and COO, Axel Johnson
Overall responsibilities
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I was primarily responsible for defining metrics, driving the product design work end-to-end, from understanding user needs, business goals, technical constraints, legal compliances, and third-party requirements, to delivering hi-fi design solutions and follow ups.
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Beyond design-related tasks, I was also co-responsible for developing the value proposition and defining the associated business requirements. This included creating roadmaps, funnels, journeys, flows, product vision, strategies, WoW, NMS, OKRs, KPIs, and more.
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I built Humlakortet design system from the ground up to enable scalable and consistent implementation of new features, leveraging and extending core design principles and to stay accessibility compliant.
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In addition to designing the core iOS a experience, I also designed the debit Mastercard, created 3D illustrations and mockups, and contributed significantly to refining the marketing materials.
Metrics and impact
Through impressions and CTR we could prove a strong interest in the product
>44%
opened app also applied for the product
NSM: Number of successful card applications per month
+18M
impressions from partner campaign channels
NSM: Number of impressions per paid campaign
+4K
signed up for pilot release of the proposition
NSM: Number of successful card applications per month
We want this to be a card you can use for all your everyday purchases. It allows us to create a marketing channel where our retailers can communicate with customers between shopping occasions. With the help of data, we can also support retailers in providing consumers with tailored offers based on their behavior and preferences.
Emil Berg Eckerrot
Former CEO, Humla
The solution
Embedded finance
As the first player in Sweden, we’ve developed a cutting edge experience for payments using SEB Embedded's Banking-as-a-Service platform.
The sunset
Since Humla AB were acquired by Axfood AB in 2023 we sunset Humlakortet to focus on our new mission to enhance customer offerings and increase loyalty at Hemköp.
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