Star Finanz and Feature Upvote

Star Finanz is a daughter company of Finanz Informatik, the IT company behind Sparkassen, a network of 650 financial institutions in Germany.

We spoke with Rainer Gibbert, head of product development for StarMoney, a multi-banking software owned by Star Finanz.

What is StarMoney?

StarMoney aggregates all your bank accounts and information in one place.

We support about 2000 different banks and account types. Bank accounts, but also your Amazon accounts, eBay, PayPal, and so on.

StarMoney lets you import and manage all those accounts in one place. You can check how much money you’ve got, see all your transactions, and transfer money to other bank accounts.

And we also have analytics. You can see what categories you spend the most money on, and so on.

Banking is the main use case of the application. But it doesn’t stop there.

You can upload documents, cancel contracts, and manage your stock portfolio all within the app. StarMoney is encrypted so all the data you store in the application is secure.

How does Star Finanz use Feature Upvote?

Every two years, we come out with a new version of StarMoney. And we always have to think about what features we need to put in there. About what we can do for our users.

Feature Upvote gives us a sense of what things might have the biggest impact on the satisfaction of our users. And on our sales.

We’ve also used Feature Upvote to find out if an idea that we have is good or not. We just publish it on our board and see whether users vote for it.

The company uses three feedback boards—one board for their private customers who use StarMoney Basic and Deluxe, another for their business product, StarMoney Business, and a third one for their mobile apps.

Our product owners monitor the boards on a regular basis. They read the feedback and check to see if it already exists. If it does, then they merge the two suggestions into one.

When a new comment or feature comes through, they react as soon as they can. Usually via email. Email notifications are important for us.

Otherwise, we are using the different statuses. One product owner also uses tags. I don’t think the others do.

Star Finanz funnels traffic to their board from two places—the menu of their application and their support forum. These two links capture most of the requests that come in with only a small amount still coming through other channels, like email or customer support.

How did you collect feedback before using Feature Upvote?

We had a contact form on our website. And one of the subjects people could choose was “feedback or ideas”. These submissions were sent to a specific email account.

We had no way of grouping similar suggestions or voting for them. It was all manually tracked in the inbox.

If the product manager was good, he knew which suggestions came more often.

Feature Upvote gave Star Finanz a way to know how relevant suggestions were to their users. Because they received feedback through other channels, it also helped them consolidate all feedback in one, organised place.

And our software is GDPR-ready, which is something their legal team required.

In one of my previous jobs, I used to work with UserVoice. So I knew tools like this. But UserVoice wasn’t a European provider and GDPR was important for us. That’s why we looked for a European provider like Feature Upvote.

What benefits of using Feature Upvote had you not anticipated?

Star Finanz saw Feature Upvote as a way to gain insight into what features the majority of their customers want.

They later found out they could also use the tool to communicate with their users. By involving them in the grooming process, they could get a better understanding of the outcomes users were looking for and deliver better features.

We like that we can discuss the ideas with the users.

It’s not only a tool for suggestions and voting. Through comments, we can discuss ideas with our customers.

I did a lot of user research. And I’ve learned that when users share an idea, it’s often not clear what they mean or what they need.

They say: “Okay, I want this”. Then you realize they actually need something else.

For this, Feature Upvote is really good. You can have a conversation and ask for more detail and context in the comments of each suggestion. That is really great.

Plus, you have all comments collected under the suggestion it’s related to. That’s good. Everything is in one place.

What are examples of popular features that you’ve had to decline?

Every now and then, Rainer and his team have to decline feature requests because the benefit-cost ratio does not make sense.

Someone asked for a Linux version of StarMoney. And then we had to say: “No. Not another operating system”.

It would be a lot of work to reprogram our software for Linux. And there are not enough users out there who need the functionality to justify doing it.

Other times, they decline suggestions because they don’t fit their strategy, even though they are popular.

In fact, they’ve had to reject one of their most upvoted suggestions ever. The request is: “Make the navigation customizable again.” It has received 149 votes.

StarMoney used to be very customizable for all types of individual needs. But it was so complex that it was very hard for new users to understand and learn.

We’ve tried to get rid of this complexity by removing functionality that is used by some users but makes the tool more complex for the majority.

So when a user asks to “make it more customizable again”, we say no. No, we don’t want to add this complexity again. But we think about other ways of helping the users–without adding more complexity.

How has your experience with Feature Upvote been so far?

Feature Upvote offers the functionality that we need. Plus, the company is a European provider so privacy and GDPR are not a problem.

The collaboration has been great. The Feature Upvote team is open to feedback. They get back to their users and ask them for feedback and what could be done better.

Any parting advice for other Feature Upvote users?

Before Star Finanz, Rainer was a user experience researcher. One thing he learned, which helps him manage user feedback at Star Finanz, is to not take suggestions at face value.

It’s important to ask your users for ideas, but always try to find out what the real need is behind an idea or suggestion.

Always ask users: “Why? Why do you need that?”

Then ask yourself how you can offer an even better solution.

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