Jenius Bank

Personas and Discovery

The Jenius Bank ethos was to empower customers toward financial wellness by embedding personalized insights into everyday banking interactions. However, there was a lot of ambiguity around what this meant in practice. Leadership had aligned on a “high earners, not rich yet” (HENRY) target customer, but this strategy was largely grounded in intuition and lacked behavioral depth.

To address this, I led a series of interviews (2 × n=10) within and outside the HENRY segment, followed by two sets of focus groups (4 × n= 8) : one with financial tool users and another with non-financial goal-oriented app users. My goal was to understand financial behaviors and broader goal-setting mindsets.

Surprisingly, these studies revealed consistent variation in financial goals regardless of the income groups. Some participants were overwhelmed and needed foundational support (monitoring, awareness), while others focused on optimization or aligning finances with identity and long-term aspirations.

Family structure and maturity actually emerged as a stronger predictor of needs than income alone, leading to sub-segmentation snapshots within the HENRY cohort. Those with more mature families, in particular, expressed a deep financial stress, complexity across the household, and anxiety about their future.

I synthesized the needs uncovered during the discovery phase into a hierarchical model. It became clear that although personalized insights were useful, they were psychologically dependent on a foundation of reliable financial budgeting and monitoring.

I then assessed the needs for proportional relevance across HENRY segments (n>1000), looking specifically for trends across income, age, household structure. Results showed needs were evenly distributed across income levels. However, when viewed in terms age and household, the findings challenged leadership’s key assumptions. Participants that had that expressed the most financial stress were much older than expected. Those with mature families in particular, who had the most stress, needed basic monitoring and budgeting support more so than personalized insights.

In partnership with product and marketing teams, I refined the target to mid-to-high income families age 35 to 55 and adjusted the product concept to support a more fundamental spectrum of needs. This approach solved real needs for a real target while also making strategic sense: if MVP could solve for basic budgeting and monitoring as a foundation the product could grow to solve higher-order financial goals as it evolved with its customer-base.

Accordingly, we moved forward keeping the focus for solutions to Monitoring, Budgeting, and Savings (future-thinking) needs.

Testing and Refinement

From ideation, we synthesized our ideas into 9 MVP-worthy wireframes and tested appetite in a large-scale survey.  Participants rated each concept in terms of perceived value and provided any feedback or recommendations to improve the concept, then ranked all the concepts in terms of value at the end.

This allowed me to identify the highest-value opportunities while also improving early ideas. Given time and resource constraints, the team moved forward with two core features that would define the MVP: Jenius View and Forecast.

Jenius View provided a centralized snapshot of a customer’s financial picture—including net worth, credit score, and aggregated assets and liabilities—while Forecast projected upcoming bills and expected balances based on historical behavior.

I led usability testing on several iterations of high-fidelity designs for Jenius View.  We explored entry point options (e.g., tab vs. slider), component prioritization, terminology (e.g., “assets/liabilities”), and overall comprehension. 

Overall, the feature was intuitive and highly-valued, with the exception of the networth component and entry-point. I conducted focused impression and preference tests for these higher friction area; we iterated and the feature quickly became a fluid experience.

Forecast was a different story.  It created immediate tension in usability testing. While it resonated conceptually in wireframes, high-fidelity testing revealed serious confusion. The interface was complex and cognitively demanding, and users struggled to differentiate it from regular transactions.

To address this, I reframed the issue with more context, and even still the confusion persisted. I leveraged clips and verbatims to convince product leadership to make an essential pivot.

We dramatically simplified what was the original focus of the tool – upcoming transactions – into a calendar view.  We then visually prioritized what we were hearing was more valuable: the bills and subscriptions monitors.  The results were striking! 

The feature drastically improved in usability, reception, and overall performance.  Being flexible to how users aligned the tool to their needs was a winning strategy!

Research Foundation

As Jenius Bank scaled, demand for research emerged across teams. But in early stages the organization lacked understanding of how research could operate and how teams could best engage with it.

Many requests were solution-driven and late-stage. Opportunities for discovery were being missed and timeline expectations were not feasible. Without a clear operating model, research risked becoming reactive, fragmented, and difficult to scale.

Strategy and Education

I introduced foundational research frameworks through several demos and forums to help stakeholders understand how research supports the product lifecycle.

This clarified when research should occur, what types of questions it could answer, and how it fit within product and design processes. It explained how research could be adaptive to confidence and rigor relative to stakeholder needs.

Research Playbook

Next, I developed a standardized research playbook covering:

• research methods, use cases, and trade-offs

• typical timelines per method with consideration for planning and synthesis

• touchpoint expectations for collaborative scoping, planning, and reporting

• recruitment strategies and statistical significance

This gave our team a shared language for processes that were transparent and repeatable across business functions. The business evolved through consistent engagement with us and easy reference to our playbook.

Standardized Intake

As research demand increased, I introduced a centralized intake process for stakeholders and scoping guidelines for researchers that proactively required teams to articulate what was commonly missing:

• business objectives and context

• problem-space with research questions

• timeline constraints

• decision points the research would inform

This created consistent research engagement and helped transition requests from informal conversations to thoughtful planning.