The financial services industry has endured a decade of increased regulatory scrutiny, disruption from challenger banks and new opportunities arising from fintech startups, all of which has revolutionized the financial services space. While this sector is focused on optimizing banking, it is based on the assumption that our existing understanding of banks, money and wealth is correct.

Enter Secco: the organization that believes differently and has the ambitious mission to not only reinvent banking, but to completely turn currency on its head.

Secco is re-imagining the world of money and commerce. They challenge the very premise of banking and the notion of currency. They believe it is about using social networks to improve commerce.

Aura is Secco’s first product. It brings the age-old concept of bartering into the digital era. Aura creates a proximity-based social network for people to exchange digital tokens that replace money in real-world transactions. In doing so, it hopes to reinvent commerce as we know it and create a social network based on digital peer-to-peer currency.

Secco partnered with ThoughtWorks to create the first prototype for experimentation in the finance and commerce industries.

Over a twelve-week period, ThoughtWorks worked closely with the Secco team to visualize Aura and create a minimum viable product (MVP) that users could interact with, allowing the team to test several ideas and concept designs.

The most interesting aspect was to create a tangible product and create the first pragmatic feedback cycle with the end users. After validation, the next step was testing the viability of the foundational technology including Mesh Networks, P2P, Blockchain and cryptocurrencies with this venture.

ThoughtWorks applied concepts of hypothesis-driven product design to validate assumptions around customer behaviors, lean product discovery and rapid software development methodologies to create an MVP: the product's first inception.

At the end of the twelve-week cycle we had built a strong product based on customer insight, paving the the way forward for Secco.