Skyeway
The financial app from the future, AI-powered
Timeline
June 2024, 4 weeks
Client
Sketchin
My Role
UX/UI Designer
Team
Alone
Overview
An AI-powered mobile app designed to help customers achieve their mid- to long-term financial goals by managing and growing their savings while educating them on personal finance.
Introduction
Context
During the Master's program in UX Design at Talent Garden, Sketchin, one of the major advanced design studios in Europe, challenged us to identify a complex problem and propose a simple and effective solution.
The project was autonomously developed under the supervision of Gea Sasso, Senior Service Designer at Sketchin, and after 4 weeks was pitched to Sketchin's leadership which included Luca Mascaro, CEO, Federico Rivera, Managing Director and Partner, and Stefano Greco, Lead UX Designer.
Focusing on the user
User Research
I started by identifying the personal finance as an area of interest, and searching within it for a complex problem to solve that affected many people. I thus conducted an analysis over about 10 days, which involved desk research (including newspapers, blogs, social media, podcasts, YouTube videos, Reddit threads), interviewing 23 people and surveying 74 individuals.
Problems
Thanks to this quantitative and qualitative analysis, I was able to identify several worries that people had about personal finance and their future, which can be traced back to these two main macro-areas:
difficulties in coping with large expenses (buying a house, setting up one's own business, moving with the entire family to another country)
concerns about the retirement, including the ability to support themself financially when they are old and no longer self-reliant.
Objectives
As I delved deeper into their worries, I better understood how their problem actually involved a large number of aspects, from financial to legal, from psychological to health, from educational to personal. I then identified the two main objectives on which to focus in seeking a solution:
help people manage and grow their savings
educate people in the foundations of personal finance.
Scouting the market
Benchmark
The market research included a wide range of competitors and comparables in different realms, including the following areas and industries:
digital banks (Revolut)
custody accounts (BBVA)
bank brokers (Fineco, Neon, Flowe)
investment brokers (Degiro, Scalable, eToro, Trading 212, Swissquote, Interactive Broker)
robo-advisors (True Wealth, Selma Finance, Inyova)
bitcoin exchages (Coinbase, Young Platform)
long-term investment strategies (Vanguard LifeStrategy Funds)
Italian pension funds (open, industry, personal)
Swiss 3rd pillars (Finpension, Frankly, VIAC)
American RC 401k
financial independent coaches and advisors
digital accountability (GenTwo).
Although I found some excellent examples among the competitors, there was no solution among them that addressed the two specific problems I had identified during my research.
In particular, especially in the Italian market, some solutions were flexible but far too complex for the knowledge of the average user, while others were very simple and accessible but at the same time extremely expensive. Some products were even, for technical and legal reasons, out of reach of consumers in Italy and the entire European Union.
Delivering the solution
Key features
With this in mind, I created Skyway, a mobile app that help people meet their goals for tomorrow. Let's explore its 4 main features.
First of all, Skyeway is an app built around an AI, Skye, and is therefore able to offer the user tailor-made financial advice. And without requiring a PhD in market economics!
As a first step, Skye encourages and supports the user to set his medium- to long-term goals. Skye first asks relevant questions to gather the necessary information and then creates the winning strategy to achieve that goal: a savings account separate from your main current account, a deposit account, a bond portfolio, a customised investment strategy.
Skyeway also offers a clear and comprehensive view of one's finances and upcoming payments, so that everything is always at the user's fingertips: the current state and the course to be taken in the coming months or years.
Finally, all this goes hand in hand with training. In the app there is an area, the Academy, dedicated to training on personal finance topics which, with a Duolingo-style notification and rewarding system, goes to train and generate self-awareness in the user. Because there is no truly valid project solution other than the one that puts the person at the centre. And with it, his or her dreams.
