[Mono] Partners Award System

01 //Business Awarding Businesses

When we talk aboiut B2B brands, we talk about businesses offering other businesses services and tools to help develop their offerings. Mono, an Open Banking company provides financial tools for other businesses to better serve their end customers.

In one of my daily musings about how to help the business connect better with customers, in our case—other business which we referred to as partners, I asked a simple question of how exactly do partners show up for each other beyond the base line symbiotic relationship of money for reliable APIs and one of the answers I came up with was getting involved in the partners journey. As a business that works with mostly startups, we understand the journey can feel very lonely, so, how do we ensure they feel seen?

02 //Introducing Partners Award System

Using physical plaques and digital badges as delivery system, we want to show our partners that we recognize their journey, celebrate their milestones and are as involved in seeing them grow. But, how do we determine who gets what and when?

03 //Metrics & Merits

To determine when they get these awards, I came up with metrics like:

The number of unique connected accounts.
The count of direct payments that happened through their product.
The number of issued virtual cards and accounts.

And other metrics that are tied to the kind of services we offer them or better say, help them offer.

04 //So, who gets what?

The digital badges would be given to partners when they cross milestones like 100,000, 250,000 through to 750,000 of the metrics. This is originally meant to be delivered through the dashboard as a pop-up, however, in the event of engineering delay, we are also able to deliver this through their registered email.

The physical plaques would be given to a partner when they cross the 1,000,000 mark of any of the defined metrics. Now that the metrics and merits are known, how do we implement this?

A screenshot of Apple fitness award badges and Spotify plaque

05 //Execution

Starting with the badges, they need to be sketched out, vectorized, then developed in the Mono illustrative style.

Badges Sketches — Flat illustrations of the badges

The Mono illustration style is very famous for the shadows caused by the louvres obstructing the light source causing the lines/strips. This was incorportated into the badges and also in the 3D render shown later in this presentation.

To make delivery less technical and ensure regardless, it get’s delivered really quickly, I developed an email banner version of the badges and made them ready to go.

An array of milestone badges to be delivered as e-mail headers

An array of honorary badges to be delivered as e-mail banners

Upon full implementation, the badges appears on the dashboard whenever a partner opens up their dashboard.

A dashboard view of the badge

06 //Now, plaques!

An overview of the three directions explored

I explored 3 directions that’s built on the famous Mono strips I mentioned earlier. The first one explores the indent, made at the base of the plaque, beneath all the prints.

The second direction explores the stips as a diagonal cut.

And the third direction explores the strips before the Mono logo.

Then something at the back…

07 //Expected results

Coming up with this idea, I believed:

Doing this informs our partners how much we value them.
They’ll most likely talk about this among other founders and this increases our brand awareness overall as a B2B company.
It makes us the first infrastructure company (to my knowledge) to award their partners for excellence.
It inspires our partner to do more numbers and that in turn increases our numbers.
It adds to the list of things that even beyond business partners, helps us connect to their brand emotionally.

08 //What's next?

Now, partners are happy, how do we make our employees even happier beyond their salary? Watch out for the next case.