Vemi is a banking startup aimed at the UK Muslim audience, focusing on ethical banking. Trouble was, everyone’s idea of what this meant was slightly different. Building a deep understanding of the target market’s thoughts, needs and emotions around modern banking was key to aligning the organisation behind a clear, executable vision.

Aligning on a vision

What I did

Start with what you know

With so many experienced people in the team, it was crucial to capture what we already knew about the target market and what our assumptions were. To do this, I carried out several workshops that mapped internal knowledge and knowledge gaps as well as views and definitions of what “ethics” means across the organisation.

This gave me a great springboard for a deep-dive into secondary research, spanning both commercial and academic insight.

Discovery research

Whilst the secondary research was hugely informative, nothing creates a deeper understanding than meeting people where they are. To do this, I carried out a series of depth interviews with Muslims from across the UK, aiming for a mix of genders, income levels and life stages.

We covered:

  • The balance between faith and finances

  • Financial education

  • Trust in banks

  • Digital preferences

  • Previous experiences with Islamic finance

Whilst it didn’t answer all the questions the team had, this provided a clear direction of travel, highlighting key issues this audience faces every day.

Quantifying it

We wanted to understand how the themes identified played out across a wider audience and carried out a small survey to look further into each topic. Whilst the sample size was not statistically significant, it did show clear themes across different participant characteristics which we were able to use for further refining the proposition.

Communicating the work

All this knowledge would have made no difference without the rest of the team’s awareness. There were several steps I took to ensure the work permeated the organisation:

  1. Everyone in the team was invited to view the sessions as they happened - seeing the participants first-hand is key to building empathy

  2. Short summaries of key insights post each call on the company’s Slack channels.

  3. Created a set of proto-personas - whilst we didn’t have enough to build “proper” personas, we had the basics to start grouping our audience

  4. Physical copies in our work space - key slides blue-tacked to the working space, full reports printed out…

  5. … and, of course, the many feedback meetings

Shahzad Enver, Vemi CEO (2022-2025)

“[Merje’s] work not only shifted internal thinking but also helped us better recognise and serve an underserved community. What was particularly valuable is how she communicated out to the wider organisation, including Board iNEDs, to educate them on our target market, the emotional problems they faced with interest based banking and what made the Vemi proposition unique in its ability to solve the faith based compromises that UK muslims encounter today with banks. The segmentation she created of UK muslims has informed our marketing campaigns.”