For splitting the bill faster than you can say KEKS

You’re having lunch with coworkers. The waiter brings the bill, and with it the hassle of settling up: someone doesn’t have cash on them, someone left their wallet in the office, or someone agreed to pay for someone else. Splitting the bill takes a long time, and other banking applications are too complicated (and involve a fee).

In collaboration with Erste Bank, we set out to tackle the hassle with the KEKS Pay app, enabling fast, secure payment sharing—without fees, and regardless where people bank. Today, it’s one of the most popular mobile apps in Croatia. 

From sending and receiving money to paying bills

At the beginning of 2017, our team of developers and designers met with Erste Bank and external collaborators to discuss the idea of ​​the first domestic peer-to-peer payment sharing application. 

We organized the teams like an internal startup, and after dozens of sprints and thousands of hours of work, we created KEKS Pay. Since it launched, KEKS has evolved beyond just sending and receiving payments.

Today with KEKS Pay you can:

• Pay for parking in more than 90 Croatian cities

• Top up ENC devices

• Pay utility bills without any fees

• Pay invoices and payment slips by scanning a 2D code

• Top up prepaid phones

• Pay for products or services directly at points of sale (physical or virtual)

• Give donations

Whenever users send or request money, they get a visual and textual description of the payment — which other banking applications around here don’t allow. Users can also start open chat groups and send messages, stickers and GIFs.

We built a brand and launched it in style

Alongside our colleagues at Utorak agency, we built the KEKS Pay brand from the ground up. We raised awareness with a detailed social strategy that featured fun pop-culture references and real-life depictions of KEKS Pay’s usefulness, encouraging thousands of users to download and use the app.

In December 2018 we organized a press event for the app launch, where we invited some of Croatia’s best-known influencers - Ivan Šarić, Nataša Janjić, Lana Klingor Mihić and Marijana Batinić. They shared their experiences using KEKS Pay and invited users to download it and try it out themselves. All told, the event generated over 70 articles in leading Croatian media outlets.

Croatia’s top-rated finance app

Today, KEKS Pay is the best-rated financial application in Croatia, and as many as 75% of its users do their banking outside of Erste. As of this writing, KEKS Pay has logged:

• Over 250,000 users

• Over 1 billion kuna (133 million euros) sent and received

• An average rating of 4.9 in both Google Play (16,000+ reviews) and the App Store (5,400+ reviews)