Over 10,000 user sign-ups and 300+ groups within the first 3 months
Designing Social Banking for Groups
A social fintech platform that merges chat with a shared group wallet and multi-approver governance to make group saving and spending transparent and safe.
Peter (Admin)
Requested €300
Sarah Smith
Contributed €150
Peter (Admin)
Paid Joshua €25.50
The choice of thousands
100K
+
Reached in 2 months of launch
750
K
Pre-seed raised
My role
Business/Product Designer & UX Lead
I worked closely with co-founders to design an operable, trustless group-finance system: user roles, governance rules, ops workflows, third-party integrations, compliance constraints, and the end-to-end product experience.
Tools used
What I owned/Experience
Business/service design (roles, governance, ops workflows)
UX/UI & design system
Integrations mapping (payment rails, KYC, OTP/bulk messaging)
Testing with QA & external users (incl. A/B testing)
Brand, investor decks, website, GTM support assets
Problem
Informal savings and spending groups rely on WhatsApp chats, screenshots, and a treasurer’s personal account to manage shared funds, which creates fraud risk, poor visibility into where money goes, messy records, and frequent disputes, so they need a simple chat-native system with built-in transparency and approvals to manage group money safely.
What breaks
Mistrust / fraud risk
Treasurer can move or disappear with funds
Low visibility
'Where did the money go?'
Messy records
screenshots ≠ ledger, disputes escalate
Worked with
Co-founders (product/business/tech leadership)
Engineering: iOS/Android, backend/database
Operations (KYC, support, edge-case resolution)
QA (internal & external testing)
Sales/Marketing (GTM assets and creative direction)
Users (interviews, surveys, focus group A/B)
The Goal
A simple trustless system that makes group finance transparent, governed, and easier to manage.
User & Use Cases
Admin / Treasurer
Needs control without being blamed or suspected.
- Collect contributions
- Propose spending
- Send payouts (incl. group send)
Member
Needs proof, transparency, and fair governance.
- Contribute easily
- See ledger & balance
- Send payouts (incl. group send)
- Approve/decline spends (if approver)
Target Groups
Saving groups
Investment clubs
Weddings & trips
Funeral funds
Community funds
HOA/Estate
Process
Discovery & validation
Informal savings and spending groups rely on WhatsApp chats, screenshots, and a treasurer’s personal account to manage shared funds, which creates fraud risk, poor visibility into where money goes, messy records, and frequent disputes, so they need a simple chat-native system with built-in transparency and approvals to manage group money safely.
Interviews, surveys, desk research, personal observation
Mapped users: admin/member, Spark ops and third-party integrations
Defined success: clarity, trust, task completion efficiency
Design & Delivery
Informal savings and spending groups rely on WhatsApp chats, screenshots, and a treasurer’s personal account to manage shared funds, which creates fraud risk, poor visibility into where money goes, messy records, and frequent disputes, so they need a simple chat-native system with built-in transparency and approvals to manage group money safely.
Flows, UI, design system, and documentation
Notification matrix and operational handling for edge cases
QA cycles and external testing and A/B experiments
White-boarding Sessions
App Screen Shots
Learnings
What was hard
Balancing chat simplicity with financial clarity
Trust & safety design
Edge cases: refunds, disputes, late payments
Onboarding & education
Regulatory/compliance assumptions and wallet model decisions
Pivoting too fast based on early adoption signals
What I’d improve
Test features longer before pivoting; define ‘kill/keep’ thresholds
Improve inactive approver resolution and dispute handling
Expand analytics instrumentation for feature adoption decisions
Key Learning
Some research signals were misleading
(e.g., ‘money request’ looked essential but underperformed).
