Reframing Cross-Border Banking from Utility to Travel Companion

Challenge

Taiwanese travelers spent NT$37.4B in Japan in Q2 2023 alone, and the E.Sun Bank app had just begun supporting cross-border payments — but adoption was not growing as expected. The gap was not a missing feature. Travelers treat a trip as one continuous event, while the app treated it as disconnected transactions: exchange the money here, pay there, split the bill later, each in its own corner of the interface. Nothing in the product knew a trip was happening.

That was the opening E.Sun Bank put to the competition — teams were asked to extend the financial ecosystem the bank had already built into a service its customers would keep using abroad.

Our team aims to provide a quick, user-friendly service to the traveling customers of E.Sun Bank — boosting the usage of cross-border payment in Japan and growing the in-trip app AU rate by 20%.

How the team worked. The five of us split across three disciplines — two on business (customer segmentation and proposal development), two on finance (the five-year model and benefit analysis; market and product analysis), and one on engineering. I owned UX and interface design. The sharpest disagreement was how tightly to bind the post-trip Memories recap to the currency-exchange feature. The related question was whether a trip's expenses could be recorded automatically as the traveler spends — carried by their E.Sun card transactions — so no one has to log purchases by hand while travelling. We settled it by making the card the recording mechanism: exchange and spending feed the recap as a by-product of paying, which is why the Memories screen can exist at all without asking users to keep a travel ledger.

Mission Dashboard, Support, and Memories Recap are real screens in the demo. The PayPay toggle uses a non-scannable demo credential, and Smart Split wasn't carried into the rebuild.

Approach

To understand the friction points, we ran our own survey of 150 participants (aged 20–40, independent travelers). It revealed that while users treat travel as one event, banking apps treat it as disconnected transactions. We identified three specific anxiety peaks:

1. Pre-trip Overload: 56% said comparing prices and deals across separate platforms was a hassle, and wanted it handled in one place.
2. In-trip Payment Fear: 88% had hit a merchant abroad that would not take a credit card and had to fall back to cash — a break in the chain of financial service.
3. Post-trip Social Friction: 74.8% came home to messy accounting caused by exchange-rate movement, and wanted a bill-splitting feature.

Method note. These three figures are first-party — our own questionnaire, run by the team, not published research. Recruitment channel, field dates, and exact question wording were not preserved in the competition materials, so treat the percentages as directional rather than reproducible. The market figures below are secondary data, cited to their sources.

We anchored the survey in an STP read of the market: Taiwanese travelers aged 20–40 who use cashless payment, plan carefully, and travel independently to Japan. Supporting research, each from a named source: the 20–40 band made up 37.69% of Taiwanese travellers to Japan (Tourism Administration MOTC, via MoneyDJ, January–October 2023); 40.3% of Taiwanese gather travel information through Instagram and Facebook (2023 social-media report); and an Agoda 2022 family-travel survey found 60% of respondents had already begun planning a trip with family. Stacking those filters — intent to visit Japan, independent travel, and travelling with family — sized the target market at roughly 986,000 travellers a year. Two personas anchored the design: a budget-conscious adult child saving up to take retired parents traveling, tracking every cost carefully; and a younger, detail-oriented traveler who documents trips on Instagram and wants to know exactly where the money went. On the competitive side, most banks and payment apps were competing on card rebates alone, with little investment in the travel process itself — E.SUN's existing PayPay partnership gave it a specific opening, since 54.7% of Taiwanese travelers abroad pay mainly by credit card (Mastercard Economics Institute), but not every merchant in Japan accepts one.

The User Journey Insight

Mapping the trip end to end surfaced a critical disconnect: while users mentally group "booking a flight" and "spending money abroad" as a single life event, the banking app treated them as isolated transactions. The friction wasn't in the interface itself, but in the timing — users viewed the bank as a passive utility and often forgot to exchange currency until the last minute.

We shifted the interaction model from Reactive (waiting for the user to search) to Anticipatory (acting on user context). Instead of a static "Currency Exchange" button, the system now recognizes the booking event and prompts the user at the optimal moment: "Your trip is in 30 days. Exchange JPY now to lock in a good rate."

Ideation: Task-Based Gamification

We utilized Gamification not merely for engagement, but as a navigation system to guide users through complex banking tasks. We structured the app information architecture around a linear timeline rather than a service catalog:

1. Mission Dashboard (Pre-Trip): A progress bar tracks "Trip Readiness." Completing a task (e.g., "Buy Insurance") fills the bar and grants a reward.
2. Crisis Mode (In-Trip): A simplified, high-contrast interface with large, thumb-friendly buttons for urgent needs ("Lost Card", "Need Cash", "No Internet").
3. Smart Split (Post-Trip): Automated accounting. Users scan a receipt or select a transaction, and the app auto-calculates shares based on the day's exchange rate.

The pre-trip checklist triggers a targeted reward the moment a task completes — a currency-exchange offer right after flight and hotel are booked, for instance — and the post-trip report was designed for social sharing from the start, modeled explicitly on Spotify Wrapped.

The rebuilt Trip Readiness panel — the working version of the pitch's Mission Dashboard concept, replacing a static progress bar with a checklist tied to real trip data.

The Support page — the working version of the pitch's Crisis Mode concept, trading the original's high-contrast emergency buttons for browsable guide cards covering the same urgent scenarios.

What We Didn't Build, and Why

Smart Split. Automated bill-splitting was part of the original pitch but wasn't carried into the rebuild. It needs settled multi-currency transaction data, and the honest version of that data didn't exist in a standalone prototype. Better to leave it out than fake a feature that doesn't exist.

Interface Design

Feature A – The "Mission" Dashboard:A card-based interface where financial products are presented as "Missions." Users can tap "Exchange Currency" to open a mission card showing the current rate trend and potential reward, reducing cognitive load.

Pictured above, under Mission Dashboard.

Feature B – Integrated Payment & Tax Refund:With the PayPay API integrated directly into the wallet, users can toggle between "Payment Code" and "Tax Refund QR Code" with a single swipe.

The Payment & Tax Refund toggle in the Services tab, reachable after connecting demo banking.

Feature C – The "Trip Recap": Inspired by Spotify Wrapped, this feature visualizes spending habits with cheerful illustrations to turn reviewing expenses into a shareable social moment.

The post-trip Memories recap — the Feature C 'Trip Recap' concept realized as a working Wrapped-style story.

Rebuilt as an Independent Prototype

After the competition, I rebuilt the concept from the ground up as a standalone interactive prototype — not affiliated with or endorsed by E.SUN Bank — to test whether the anticipatory, timeline-based model held up as a working product rather than a pitch deck.

The Travel Money Hub's trip-scoped consent flow — each permission states which simulated data it unlocks.

Outcome

1. Award: 3rd place out of 200 teams (50,000 NTD), selected by E.Sun's judging panel.
2. Validated direction: Judges endorsed the anticipatory, timeline-based model as a credible way to lift cross-border payment adoption.
3. Design target (projected, not shipped): A ~20% lift in in-trip app activity and lower drop-off in the exchange and insurance flows, modeled from the n=150 survey.

The business case. The five-year financial model behind that target projected a first-year net loss of about NT$16.8M before turning profitable, reaching roughly NT$35.7M by year five. It is worth separating what was sourced from what we assumed. Sourced: Taiwan's 2.86 million recorded trips to Japan through August of the competition year (Tourism Administration, MOTC). Assumed by us: that 10% of E.SUN's existing account holders would adopt the feature, rising to 15% by year five — set against cost lines for staffing, development and maintenance, marketing, and transaction-fee rebates, with revenue from transaction fees and a data-insight service. One figure came from the government; the adoption curve that drives the entire model was ours.

Reflection

The decision I keep returning to is cutting Smart Split. It was the feature that tested best in the pitch — 74.8% of our survey respondents named bill-splitting as a real pain — and it was the first thing I dropped when I rebuilt the concept as a working product. I could have shipped a convincing fake. Leaving the gap visible was the more useful choice, because it made the boundary between what the design proves and what it merely proposes legible to anyone reviewing it.

What I would validate differently: our survey told us bill-splitting was painful, and we jumped straight to automating the arithmetic. It never tested whether travelers would trusta bank's automatic split of a shared meal at a fluctuating exchange rate — a question about trust in a calculation, not about effort saved. Next time I would put a rough split flow in front of users and watch where they reach for the calculator anyway, before committing the feature to a pitch.

The broader lesson was about the domain itself. Financial UX is heavily regulated because money carries real risk, and reducing the anxiety of paying abroad matters as much as the transaction succeeding. Friendly visuals and clear progress indicators turned a stressful chore into a supportive travel companion — but in this domain, the design work is inseparable from being precise about what is simulated, what is proposed, and what is real.

Media coverage

• News Coverage3rd place Team 熊欣壯志