6 Unconventional Recommendations to Consider When Designing Financial Apps

I was sitting on the side of the road in a slum called Likoni near Mombasa, Kenya. A goat that had recently given birth ran by me with its placenta still connected and hanging out. Four kids were running behind the goat with the biggest smiles on their faces. They were thrilled. The goat was not.

I was 25 years old at the time and recently moved to Mombasa to study microfinance. Chaotic scenes like this happened almost every day. Likoni was predominantly Muslim, people lived in abject poverty, and they spoke Swahili. It would be easy to focus on the differences from my upbringing in the US and feel removed from my surroundings. But then a strange thing happened when that goat ran by.

All I could see where the commonalities between cultures. Mothers loving their kids, people sharing stories about their day over dinner, schoolboys and girls flirting with each other during recess, people arguing over money. And that was it. No matter who you were, young or old, rich or poor, people always had an intense emotional reaction to money.

This sent me on a journey for over a decade to understand how and why money was so emotional, and how can we use this knowledge to better design financial apps. Since that time in Likoni I’ve built financial mobile apps at Tala and SoLo based on these 3 truths:

1. Negative emotions and stress dominate our relationship with money

2. Stress changes how our brains work and can lead to poor decision making 

3. Using design best practices, we can remove the negativity from dealing with money to build better financial services

During the years, people have asked me for resources they can reference when building the next generation of financial services. So here are a few I believe are fundamental in understanding the emotional state of the user when dealing with money and how to provide a path for your user to turn that negativity into empowerment. 

How we think about money

1. The 30 Day Money Cleanse - I like this book by Ashley Feinstein Gerstley because it begins with the individual. It provides a toolkit for some self-reflection and then takes the reader on a journey to align our spending with our values. The author also identifies ways we commonly beat our selves up about our financial habits. This can be a great resource for product managers when building empathy with your users.

2. Getting Emotional About Money - Short Forbes article by Danielle LaPorte, a Canadian author who mostly focuses on self-realization content. This post is useful because she lays out a set of questions she asks the reader to walk through in order to understand where they feel bad about their finances and when they feel good. The part I love here is that these questions can be answered just by having your user connect their bank account. It can give you a brilliant snapshot of exactly what your user feels about their finances and when to give them nudges within your app. 

3. Is Transparency in Financial Services Enough? - A great post from Happy Money’s CEO, Scott Saunders who very clearly articulates why it’s so important to cultivate safety when building financial apps. In case you haven’t seen a theme here, people generally feel bad and scared about their finances. Be proactive and build a bridge to the user by creating a trust-filled relationship from the very beginning. 

How our brains cope with stress

1. Buddha’s Brain - “If you can change your brain, you can change your life”. This is a fantastic book that marries neuroscience and Buddhism. It doesn’t get too technical, but it does explain how our minds can get into circular ways of thinking as we get older. The authors also provide tactics on how to break out of these mental habits. These tactics can be used when freeing your users from the well-worn path of stress when it comes to dealing with money. 

2. The Upside of Stress - The author’s intention here is to reframe the classic notion that “stress is bad for you”. A trained psychologist, she taps into what stress does to our body and brains and provides a new narrative of how it is in fact, empowering for us. This book provides a path you can take your user on to not only alleviate the stress that can come with money but begin to change their internal narrative to make them feel empowered.

3. Never Split the Difference - A truly fantastic book written by the ex-head negotiator for the FBI. While the book centers around how to become a better negotiator, I’d argue that these same lessons can be applied when thinking of app design. Fear, lack of control, and thoughts of failure that people feel when it comes to losing a business deal are similar to when people are feeling desperate about their finances. Know that you need to meet the user where they are, speak their language, and build their trust before you can truly help them with any financial problem they may have.