At American Express Serve, we want to reshape how people manage their money and bring better, more affordable services to those who need them most. Today in the U.S., nearly 70 million people are unable to use traditional financial services because they’re not universally affordable, accessible, or available. Many rely on costly and time consuming methods to get cash, pay their bills, and manage their budgets, using only a mobile phone to access the internet at home. For them, mobile isn’t just about access on the go—it’s about access, period. To meet this particular need, we built a fluid, responsive web experience and code base that can grow and change as our users do, without app updates or device discrimination. By having an adaptable tech platform, we’re able to meet our customers wherever they are faster than ever, positioning Serve as an industry leader for financial inclusion.

When turning our attention to underbanked populations with Serve, we made it our mission to craft financial tools that were accessible and empowering to our customers in every way. Through interviews with real users and broader field research on the underbanked, we discovered that even simple financial management was convoluted and expensive for them. Often users had to pay exorbitant fees and wait long times to do even simple things such as adding money to a prepaid card. Serve used this responsive redesign to focus on making every part of using our product accessible and tailored to an audience that is generally burned by financial systems. The result is a responsive web experience for our customers in more ways than one. Sure, our site is beautiful and easy to navigate on any device, but our goal with the responsive project was not just to make a website responsive; it was also to foster financial confidence and trust in a population of the nearly 70 million financially underserved Americans by giving them a dynamic product experience that meets a multitude of differing needs. It is bringing that user-centered approach to life and making it part of everything we do here at American Express Serve. Our redesign didn’t just focus on making our product responsive, but it also built flexibility into our tech platform as well. With Serve, we fashioned a tech platform that works like a toolbox, where different functionalities can be mixed and matched to generate a wide variety of products and experiences for our customers. We’ve put this into practice by creating the user experiences of Bluebird and the new experience of Serve within the Isis Mobile Wallet. Using our flexible platform, we’re able to target our products to specific user needs, making a tool that truly brings financial inclusion to millions of Americans.