Shared Balance

Mar/24 → Sep/24

The Shared Balance's mission is to seamlessly integrate shared expenses, delivering a simplified experience where financial well-being meets the strength of groups. This initiative was born out of a critical need: 84% of the customers share household expenses and require an effortless, unified tool for joint finances.

My role was to execute the design strategy necessary to achieve Product-Market Fit for the shared experience, primarily focusing on defining and amplifying the Shared Account and its core functionalities.

Mobile displaying the shared balance interface

Shared balance screens showing joint finance features

(I)

Strategic Problem & UX Challenge

The project was driven by a critical business move: to transform our offering into a Social Financial Platform, designed to close a significant market and user experience gap in shared finance management.

Our vision was to establish a banking ecosystem that seamlessly integrated fundamental social financial needs while upholding privacy and security standards.

The Starting Point

Initial Target Segment: High-Income Brazilian customers (typically married with children) who required a straightforward tool for joint household management.

Product Status: The existing Shared Balance, launched late 2023 , was feature-poor, offering only basic money transfers. This failed to meet customer needs and prevented its adoption as a primary financial tool.

[Fig 1] Shared Balance Screens

[Fig 2] Onboarding and Activation Flow

[Fig 3] Strategic Vision, Figma File

[Fig 4] Strategic Vision, First Prototype

[Fig 5] Shared DDA Flow Design

[Fig 6] Account Activation Test Variant

(II)

Design Focus: Solving Parity and Friction

My design work focused on resolving the two major obstacles to adoption: closing the functional gap and optimizing the user experience.

1. Functional Gap: Design flows to enable the Shared Balance to act as a funding source for all major payment and transaction methods, designing the new transactional screens and funding source selection flows to maintain a seamless, consistent experience with the core app.

2. User Experience: Design solutions to resolve customer pain points and improve accessibility, executing usability experiments and iterations to ensure complex concepts (like ownership and partner visibility) were intuitive, transforming a confusing separate experience into a cohesive first-layer app experience.

(III)

Key Design Deliverables & Impact

My work was instrumental in moving the Shared Balance from a feature-poor state toward Product-Market Fit by directly impacting core usability metrics, transaction volume, and feature parity. By the time I transitioned out of the team, the measurable impact included an increase in SES (Sean Ellis Score) and near-doubled average group transactions.

✎ Executing Functional Parity: Closed the functional gap, designing flows that granted the Shared Balance feature parity with the Individual Account. Enabled Shared Balance as a funding source for PIX, Boleto, and Credit Card Bill Payments, as well as Scheduled and Programmed payments, while running multiple UI fixes on the flow.

✎ Strategic Vision: Created design visions and strategic prototypes for 6-month, 1-year, and 3-year timeframes, defining the long-term UX architecture for shared offerings planned for 2025.

✎ Value Expansion: Designed initial user flows for the Shared Payments Assistant and Shared Boleto , to allow couples to easily get access to their shared bills.

✎ Activation & Engagement Through A/B Testing: Designed and led the execution of tests focused on resolving entry barriers and low engagement, focusing on improving Onboarding Activation and Widget's CTR (Click-Through Rate), achieving significant growth in Monthly Active Users (MAU) and First Deposit rates.

✎ Entry Point Redesign: Increased the entry point's findability by pairing with key teams to create a design solution for displaying the Shared Balance within the App Home and Personal Account's Dashboard, resolving a major user pain point.

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