FCMB Gro Investment

TL;DR

FCMB Gro put fixed and variable income investing directly inside the FCMB mobile app: no relationship manager, no branch visit, just a phone and a savings account.

I led the end-to-end investment flow, from choosing a plan to funding it, focused on making fixed and variable income investing accessible to everyday FCMB users and clarifying every rate, tenor, and repayment tradeoff before they committed a single naira.

Context

Gro launched in 2023 as part of a broader digital wealth push at FCMB, one piece of a bank-wide bet on self-serve financial products. FCMB Group's digital revenue, spanning Payments, Lending, and Wealth, grew 69.2% between 2021 and 2022, from ₦60.3 billion to ₦101.9 billion.

Gro was built to capture that shift for retail investing specifically: turning a product that had only ever been sold through relationship managers and physical branches into something a first-time investor could discover, understand, and fund entirely on their own.

Problem

Fixed income investing at FCMB had never been designed for self-service. It lived inside relationship manager conversations, explained one-on-one, over a call or across a desk. Moving that onto a phone surfaced three problems:

• Unfamiliar territory for first-time investors. Most Gro users had never bought a fixed income product before. Tenor, maturity date, and repayment amount meant nothing without someone to translate them.
• Drop-off between choosing a plan and funding it. Every extra screen between selecting an investment and confirming it was a chance to abandon, especially once the app asked for a real transfer of money.
• Tradeoffs scattered across the flow. Interest rate, tenor, and maturity date lived on separate screens, so investors were effectively committing to a plan before they could weigh it against the alternative.

Approach & Solution

Three principles shaped the flow: translate financial terms before asking for money, collapse every tradeoff onto one screen, and make the point of no return unmistakable.

The Gro investment flow runs in four steps: choose a plan, enter a principal amount on a dedicated numeric keypad, pick the funding account, and review. Each step asks for exactly one decision.

The review screen is the center of the flow. Package, principal, interest rate, tenor, maturity date, and expected repayment amount render together on a single card, so an investor can check the full shape of the commitment before agreeing to FCMB's terms and conditions.

Confirmation runs on a slide-to-approve control rather than a tap. Committing real money to a fixed-term product needed a deliberate action, not the same one-tap pattern used for balance checks or bill payments elsewhere in the app.

Impact

Within its first year, Gro became FCMB's primary channel for self-service fixed and variable income investing, a product that had never existed on the app before. 58% of investors who started a plan carried it through to a funded investment, the flow moved ₦2.4B+ in assets under management, and 41% of first-time investors came back to invest again within 90 days, a sign the product built real trust rather than converting once and disappearing.