Swift Finance: How to save for your goals- A UX case study
Part 1- Tracking your finances
Part 2- Saving money for your goals — you’re here 📍
Part 3- Behind the scenes
This blog is the second part of a series and is focussed on saving for your goals. Goals act as a trigger that motivates us to save money. A goal could be anything: Growing your wealth, save for a vacation, or maybe starting a startup!
In the previous part, we ended our discussion thinking of a use case where you have some surplus money left and would want to save it for your next travel destination.
Meet Aarushi,
She is a 26-year-old who is living and working for an IT firm in Bangalore. She likes traveling places, exploring cuisines and meeting new people. This case study captures how she plans her trip and explore some ways that could help to achieve her goal in terms of finance.
Aarushi saw an ad on Instagram about a tourism package for Norway. She went through the itinerary being offered and googled more about the place. She also spoke to her friend who visited the country lately.
Convinced about the place, she browses the flight and hotel prices. A rough estimation for the trip came out to be Rs. 1,10,000. She then calculates how much she can save monthly after paying all the fixed expenses which comes out to be:
Rs. 6,000 a month!! This would take forever. Let’s see what I can cut down.
After an hour of crunching numbers, she figured that she could save up to Rs. 9,000 per month. That equates a timeline of 1 year and 1 month to reach the goal. She put milestones to book the flight and hotels at least 3 months before the trip to get better prices.
With the plan in place, she transferred the first installment of Rs. 10,000 to her secondary account which she uses to collect surplus money. She was pouring extra Rs. 1,000–1,200 every month and was telling her friends about her awesome plan. Some months saw lesser savings due to social events but every month has seen the contribution towards the goal.
She collected around 75,000 in 7 months and book flight and stay. Now her date is fixed on the 21st of April 2021. Now Rs. 35,000 is to be saved for food and other expenses.
In the month of January, she gets a reminder from her company to submit the proofs of her investments which she declared previous year. She has completely forgotten about the Rs. 20,000 she needs to invest to take full benefit of tax exemptions.
So her next step was to cut down her extra expenses to save a little extra. She started taking public transport, cut down her evening break at Chaayos. She focused on collecting Rs. 20,000 for the investment & submitted the proofs.👏
In the last two months before the trip, she managed to save Rs. 25,000. (her goal was Rs. 35,000) Now she has two options:
- Either cut down places from her itinerary.
- Use her credit card or borrow money from her friend.
She chose to do both — used the credit card at some places and cut down a few meals.
Overall, she enjoyed her 1st international trip which is evident on her Instagram 🖼️.
Now, let’s re-imagine this scenario using Swift Finance
In the “Goals” tab she already has created a goal for 80C investments. Now let’s watch as she creates her travel goal.
She quickly created a travel goal, input a goal amount, chose whether the amount is fixed or can vary, did the same thing with the timeline.
She could clearly see how much she needs to save and what amount is feasible for her to save. She could adjust the goal right there and gets a realistic timeline. If she is not happy, she could also adjust the other goal (saving for taxes) and prioritize this goal.
The app sends reminders of upcoming installments and lets you see the realtime status of your goals.
Adjusting goals
Planning for the future is great but no one can predict what will happen next. This is how you could adjust between goals. The goals which are fixed (neither the amount nor the timeline can be compromised) will appear as locked and will not change while adjusting.
For a new user
Let’s look into the journey of a new user. It starts with identifying the money that could be saved and creating a saving budget. Next, the app will nudge the user to create goals. Here is how the journey looks like —
In the process, the app asks for two bank accounts. The first bank will be the source and the second one would be the destination where the savings are kept. In case the user does not have 2 savings account, the app will either gives the option to invest money in other instrument or transfer money to Swift Finance’s partnered banks. Those banks are regulated by the central bank of the country.
I chose to give the first option as bank to bank transfer because our users are not much savvy with other instruments.
To transfer money from 1st account to another, the app could partner with popular payment apps like Phonepe .
If the user wants to explore other growth options such as mutual finds, Stocks, the app lets you convert the destination from your bank to chosen instruments. Let’s see how a user can explore other instruments —
So now instead of saving money into your other bank, you’re investing in other financial products. The app can still read the transaction message and updates the goal.
Future scope
By the end of testing people seem to like the ability to transfer funds from their primary account to secondary on a particular date.
Also, talking to people gave me different ideas about how might we build more conditions to transfer money for savings?
- Percentage-based transfers: Triggers when a deposit is made and it transfers a percentage of that whole deposit.
- Sweep Transfers: Triggers when the balance reaches above a certain amount.
- A small amount every week: Triggers when it detects that all major expenses have been paid & it’s safe to transfer a small amount every week.
Other aspects like lumpsum top-ups and withdrawals could also be worked upon.
In the last part, I would want to talk about my explorations and how I got to this solution. Some usability results that helped me to refine the solution further
Part-3: Behind the scenes
Check my work on Dribbble: https://dribbble.com/meetdemo
Let’s connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meetdemo/
