Designing for Financial Confidence: Beyond the Balance Sheet
Transforming a legacy banking utility into a daily wealth-building habit. By moving beyond traditional income segmentation, we utilised behavioural psychology and financial maturity models to bridge the gap between complex institutional products and user trust.
June - October 2021
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Research goal
Decode Financial Behavior: Move beyond surface-level needs to map the psychological drivers behind how different user segments perceive wealth and debt.
Strategic Vendor Assessment: Evaluate the technical capabilities of Meniga ( externa partner) not just for feature parity, but for Product-Market Fit. The goal was to determine if their "out-of-the-box" algorithms could solve the specific "Jobs to be Done" of the South African market.
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Client and project type
The Context: Enterprise Integration This was a strategic digital transformation project for one of South Africa’s largest Tier 1 banks. The directive was to create a secondary app concept that integrates a white-label solution from a global fintech partner.
I operated as the Product Design Lead representing the Bank. My role was to act as the "bridge" between the Bank's legacy infrastructure and the external partner's modern tech stack—ensuring we didn't just "install software," but crafted a coherent, localised product experience.
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My role and responsibilities
Product Strategy: Co-authored the feature roadmap, prioritising high-impact features that aligned user needs with technical feasibility.
Stakeholder Alignment: Translated complex business requirements to secure buy-in from executive banking leadership.
Discovery & Validation: Led user interviews and prototyping cycles to validate our "Financial Maturity" hypothesis.
Project Summary
To transform a static banking utility into an intelligent wealth partner. The objective was to design an adaptive PFM engine that learns from user behaviour to deliver personalised financial guidance, driving literacy and long-term asset growth.
Strategic Outcomes:
Define the Roadmap: Establish a feature priority matrix based on user demand, not just stakeholder assumptions.
Vendor Validation: Stress-test the technology partner’s "out-of-the-box" algorithms against real-world South African user needs (Jobs to be Done)
The Challenge Landscape
The behavioural gap
Making money is only half the problem, knowing how to spend your money well, is the bigger, unfulfilled half.
Customer behavioural gap:
South Africa faces a critical financial literacy gap. For a PFM tool to succeed, it couldn't just display graphs; it had to educate. The challenge was to design a "Just-in-Time" learning system that guided users through basic concepts without feeling condescending—a friction point often seen in complex financial products.
Subsection: Legacy vs. Innovation (Technical)
PFM requires real-time data integration to offer value. Achieving this within a legacy banking environment (systems built decades ago) was a significant hurdle. My role was to design UI patterns that masked backend latency, creating the illusion of a seamless, modern ecosystem despite the "spaghetti code" underneath.
Subsection: Growth & Retention (Business)
With South Africa's population of 60 million, only 36% of them are active mobile internet users*, and an even smaller percentage are active ‘mobile bankers’.
To increase our customer base, we have to formulate a business case to show how targeting the younger population can be a revenue generating proposition
Research approach
Qualitative & Attitudinal interviews
Methodology: Simulation & Contextual Inquiry Since the tech partner’s demo environment used generic data, we leaned heavily on qualitative situational testing. We simulated specific financial life events (e.g., "You just received a bonus," or "You overspent on groceries") to observe user reactions and mental models.
The Cohort:
Sample Size: 29 Participants (High confidence qualitative data).
Diversity: Income ranging from R0 to R65k/month. This wide spread was crucial to ensure our solution worked for both the underbanked and high-net-worth individuals.
Phase 1: Usability (The "What"):
Observing direct interaction with the tech demo to identify friction points.
Phase 2: Concept Testing (The "Why")
Deep-dive interviews using mid-fidelity prototypes to uncover the emotional triggers behind saving, spending, and debt.
The Strategic Pivot
Step 1: Pattern Recognition
We utilised affinity mapping to group thousands of data points into common "User Stories."
Step 2: The Breakthrough (Behaviour > Income)
We disproved the bank's core hypothesis that users should be grouped by income (LSM). Instead, Financial Maturity—a user's confidence and behaviour—proved to be the true predictor of engagement. A wealthy user could be financially illiterate, while a low-income student could be highly disciplined.
Step 3: Defining the Archetypes
We restructured the entire product roadmap around three behavioural segments rather than income brackets. This became our "Feature Priority Matrix."
Step 4: Segment lens and PFM categories
We grouped and gathered participant responses based on feature behaviour, and on their segment, in order to guide and inform product roadmap.
The 3 Stages of Financial Maturity
We discovered a direct correlation between Financial Confidence and the value derived from tools like budgeting.
Behavioural based segments
Behaviour: Financially reactive. "Budgeting" feels restrictive and scary.
Product Need: Spend Tracking. They don't need a planner; they need a rear-view mirror to understand where their money went.
Value: Financial planning vs Spend tracking
Behaviour: Financially curious. Starting to earn and wanting to optimise.
Product Need: Peer Comparison. They are highly receptive to "benchmarking" (e.g., "You spend less on food than people like you") as a motivation tool..
Peer comparison as a financial benchmark
Behaviour: Financially proactive. Managing complex assets or family needs.
Product Need: Forecasting. They want tools to project future wealth and manage liquidity.
Insight: Contextualising Peer Data We found that "Peer Comparison" is a double-edged sword. Users hated being compared to "The Average." But when we framed it as a Challenge ("Can you beat the average?"), engagement skyrocketed. This gamification element became a core feature for the "Newly Independent" segment.
Conclusion
Personal Financial Management is highly underserved in Fintech, and especially in South Africa. This is mostly because it requires extreme integration of large scale ecosystems. In South Africa, this becomes even more challenges for banks that are built on decade old systems.
To create a successful PFM on the banking app, there needs to be an accessible education element.
My learnings:
Working on a project that is very much dependent on the technologies available, can be hindering. I had to consider the user, as well as the business systems in order to propose a viable solution.
One thing that was surprising, was even though we interviewed people from all income levels, the basic financial literacy is very much lacking across the board, and very problematic if South Africa wants to improve the financial health of individuals.