How to choose a niche for your own digital bank app

Start with people you already know

The best niche is one you belong to or serve already: your community, your trade, your city, your church or mosque, your diaspora group, your customers. You know their problems, you speak their language, and they already trust you.

A stranger with a slick app loses to a familiar name with a good one.

Five kinds of niche that work

Most successful challengers start in one of these.

1. A community: people who share a language, faith, culture or home country.
2. A corridor: people who send money between two places, like the UK and Nigeria, and are tired of the fees.
3. A trade: hairdressers, drivers, market traders, tutors, builders. Each has its own way of getting paid.
4. A city or town: a local app with local support, local offers and a name people recognise.
5. An existing group: a club, an association, a school, a union or a membership you already run.

Test it before you build it

Ask ten people in your niche three questions: how they pay and get paid today, what annoys them about it, and what they would switch for. If the same complaint comes up again and again, that complaint is your pitch.

If nobody cares, try the next niche. It costs you a few conversations, not a launch.

Name the giant you are taking on

Your niche already uses somebody: a big bank, a mobile money app or a transfer company. Write down what they do badly for your people. That list becomes your homepage, your fees and your first message to users.