Large Scale Survey on Peer-to-Peer Payments
Survey | Payments Research | Impact: Product Strategy & Roadmap
Small business owners take many different shapes and forms and the way they create and manage their cash flow structure is no different.
I led a study to understand how to better increase balance retention within Square Checking, discovering an opportunity to incorporate peer-to-peer payments as an additional payment option. A feature like this would help small business owners pay their suppliers, third party vendors, and contracted employees without having to transfer their funds to a third party account.
Although the team knew peer-to-peer payments were important, the team needed to validate the demand. The team was confident that peer-to-peer payments would positively impact user satisfaction and balance retention so the research objective was clear: to understand which peer-to-peer payment options small businesses needed to better manage their cash flow out.
My Role
As the lead UX researcher for Square Banking, I designed and led a large-scale survey (N=1000) to understand user awareness, trust, and intent to adopt peer-to-peer payment options in the US, evaluating methods such as Zelle, Venmo, PayPal, and Cash App.
I identified insights that were specific to our users and partnered closely with product managers, designers, and marketers to scope the right questions, ensure the survey captured differences in business and financial structures, and deliver findings that could directly shape roadmap decisions.
Methodology
Sample: 1,000 Square banking and non-banking users.
Survey content:
Awareness, familiarity, usage with peer-to-peer payment types
Preferences of payment types when paying 3rd parties
Trust and security perceptions
Likelihood of adoption
Trade-offs around convenience, fees, and protection
Analysis: Quantified intent levels, compared across different business segments, and tied recommendations directly to roadmap feasibility.
Findings
Once we reached statistical significance, I ran a live session with my stakeholders by going through top-level responses and prompting the team to capture any observations and refine follow-up questions. Tailoring questions to capture differences in data within segments, I built an AI prompt to pull insights, shortening the analysis time by 1-2 weeks.
Key Findings:
Zelle has highest awareness and adoption with our users who have more complex business and financial set-ups (high movement of COGS, larger and frequent invoice payments).
CashApp and PayPal retain high adoption by users in high-touch industries (goods and services, health & beauty, etc.) and are also most often used for personal reasons (paying rent for example).
Fraud protection is one of the biggest areas of interest for small business owners as p2p payments traditionally do not provide robust fraud protection of traditional business accounts.
Impact
The findings gave the cross-functional team the confidence to incorporate specific peer-to-peer payment options into the current experience.
I then worked with design and Transfers product team to set-up an experiment on payment types to address hierarchy of P2P against traditional payments out (ACH, A&R, checks).
I also connected findings with our marketing and financial suite teams to refine our holistic cash flow value prop that would enable users to best manage their “cash out”.
Reflections
Surveys are important when needing broad insights from many users and confirming things we already know from prior qualitative research. This coupling is key to informing business and product strategy by providing a fuller picture of what users do and why they do them.
Key Takeaways for me
Importance of cross-functional alignment. I partner early and often with product and design. From scoping and research questions, to analysis and brainstorming - democratizing research empowers my partners to act.
Leveraging AI streamlines the analysis process, but its still important to do your due diligence for a more human feel.
This was an interesting exercise is balancing both business strategy with user needs. Our user base is quite different across Block, consumer-first CashApp vs. small business owner-first Square. In retrospect, I would have invested more time in cultivating relationships between product leads and design a study connecting to a larger peer-to-peer payments strategy across Block.