Barclays

Proposition Design • Competitor Analysis • Market Validation

Designing a market-ready retail financing proposition

Context

Client: Barclays

The challenge: Define and validate a new point-of-sale financing proposition for Barclays, ensuring it could compete effectively against established players like Klarna.

Our solution: Led deep secondary research into the competitive landscape, designed the core value proposition, and created marketing assets like landing pages to validate market demand.

Key results

Market-ready

Value proposition designed

Deep insight

Competitor landscape mapped

Validated

Go-to-market strategy

The challenge: competing in a crowded market

Barclays needed to enter the competitive point-of-sale financing market. The challenge was not just to design a seamless customer journey, but to first define a compelling, marketable proposition that could stand out against agile, dominant competitors like Klarna.

Our approach: insight to a marketable concept

My approach began with deep secondary research to thoroughly map the competitive landscape, focusing on deconstructing the value proposition and user experience of key players like Klarna. This foundational insight allowed us to design a differentiated proposition and a seamless customer journey, which we then translated into marketable concepts, including landing pages, to validate demand.

Visualising the approach

Selected artefacts from the strategic work, showing how market insights were translated into a validated go-to-market proposition.

Slide from a presentation showing competitor analysis of the FinTech market, including players like Klarna. — Value proposition
Creating a compelling customer-facing concept.

Diagram of a detailed customer journey map for a new point-of-sale financing product. — Design sprint
Co-creating with users and stakeholders rapidly.

A collection of sticky notes from a design sprint, showing ideas and user feedback. — Market Validation
Taking the design sprint outputs and creating landing pages.

The solution: a complete go-to-market toolkit

The research findings were synthesised into a complete go-to-market toolkit. This included a high-fidelity prototype of the customer journey, a clear value proposition, and initial landing page concepts designed to test and understand market demand before committing to a full build.

My impact on the project

As the user research and strategy lead, I translated market analysis into a clear, validated go-to-market proposition, de-risking a major strategic investment for the bank.

Led deep secondary research to map the competitive point-of-sale financing landscape.
Deconstructed the value propositions and user journeys of market leaders like Klarna.
Designed a differentiated core value proposition for the new Barclays service.
Created a seamless, end-to-end customer journey for the financing experience.
Developed marketable assets, including high-fidelity prototypes and landing pages.
Provided a validated, evidence-based go-to-market strategy to de-risk market entry.

The results: de-risking market entry

The deep research and validated proposition provided Barclays with the high confidence to enter a new market. This strategic, evidence-based approach significantly de-risked their investment, ensuring the final product was not only user-friendly but also commercially viable from day one.

Validated

Go-to-market strategy

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