Improving NationHela

Despite the ease of use, and convenience of Nation Hela as an online prepaid card and as a travel card, there are few challenges that need to be tweaked to improve the user experience for National Hela users.

Card Top Up 

The only reliable way of topping up the card is by physically going to a Diamond Trust Bank branch. Agents of the bank don’t handle NationHela top-up’s and surprisingly, Safaricom’s M-Pesa - which would be the ideal way for millions of Kenyans to load a card - does not work all the time. It’s a hit or miss experience, with many phone calls having to be made to Hela at Diamond Trust to trace the date/time/amount of the M-Pesa transfer – only for that to be reversed. 

Account Management

For now you can request for an abbreviated statement by SMS, as well as get an SMS each time you transact with the card in Kenya.  

There's also the NationHela site, where a user should be able to view a history of transactions, and do other functions like block a stolen card. But access to the site remains a challenge - at first it looked like another bank site that only works on Internet Explorer browser and a Microsoft Windows PC combination, but no matter the device tablet, mac, or PC laptop, access to the site is a challenge - with password characters not visible, password changes not reflected, pop-up’s (that are auto-blocked on many browsers due to spam) etc. 

Easy of top-up and viewing transaction history are two essential user experience challenge points that need to be addressed, for the card to get wide acceptance.