Launching Finn by Chase: Crafting a Digital Banking
Experience for Millennials

Unlocking Millennial Spending Behavior for Chase's Digital Bank, Finn

What We Wanted:

Chase, a traditional "brick and mortar" bank, sought to engage a younger, digitally-native demographic (millennials) by creating a unique, all-digital banking experience called Finn. The core challenge was to understand this diverse demographic's spending behavior and financial needs to differentiate Finn in a lucrative digital banking market.

Role: product designer / motion & interaction

I had the opportunity to be a part of, from discovery to launch, direct collaboration on research, testing, synthesis, ideation, and defining the product's look and feel.

How can we create an experience that's unique to our customers and exhibit an understanding of their spending behavior?

Approach:

Our team conducted extensive user research, including one-on-one interviews, street intercepts, and journaling (video responses) to uncover millennial mindsets regarding money and financial wellness. We synthesized these insights into user needs based on Maslow's hierarchy, which informed 17 ideation exercises to define Finn's unique value proposition.

Which led to a lot of sketching and conversation before pushing a pixel.

We conducted regular cadence of user-testing within sprints, continually boiling the insights down to the essentials and saving the cook off for future app features. We used an agency to supply participants and had testing facilities on-premise. I led design on a few features and also created prototypes for live user testing.

As a visual designer, I played a key role in the project's "personality research." This involved collating mood boards, styles, fonts, colors, and imagery into distinct visual personalities for user testing. Notably, this research included testing for color palette preferences, a typically challenging and polarizing aspect. The insights from this process ultimately led to the adoption of a "dark mode" aesthetic, which the team then iterated upon to build out the comprehensive design system.

Results:

Finn differentiated itself by focusing on unmet needs of specific millennial segments, providing tools for deeper spending understanding and savings goals, while eliminating fees. The in-depth research and iterative design process ensured the product was deeply informed by the target demographic, resulting in a unique and intuitive digital banking experience that resonated with its users. The preferred "dark mode" aesthetic also set a distinct visual identity for the brand.