Kniru Financial Sharing Feature by Priya BhattKniru Financial Sharing Feature by Priya Bhatt

Kniru Financial Sharing Feature

Priya Bhatt

UX Designer

Proto.io

UserTesting

UXPin

Designing a way for NRI families to share finances, without sharing everything

How I went from a CEO ask to a feature that actually solved the trust problem families weren't talking about.

My Role

UX Design Intern

Duration

May 2023 – Sept 2023

What I did

UX/UI Design, Prototyping, User Research

tl;dr

What is it

A selective sharing feature inside Kniru that lets users share parts of their finances (balance, transactions, assets, liabilities) with family, instead of sharing everything or nothing.

Who it's for

NRI families, especially students studying abroad and their parents back home who wanted financial visibility without overstepping.

Overview

Kniru is a personal finance product built for cross-border families. It connects Indian and international bank accounts into one app and shows users their total net worth, assets, liabilities, spending, and upcoming payments in one place. It also runs an AI assistant for credit score advice, subscription tracking, budgeting, and spending analysis.

Why this feature existed

Kniru's founder went through this himself. He was an Indian student in the US, and his parents wanted visibility into how he was spending. His Indian classmates were dealing with the same dynamic.

When I joined Kniru, the sharing feature was one of the first things on the roadmap. It wasn't a "nice to have." It was the reason the product existed in the first place.

The Problem

Before Kniru, NRI families were already trying to share financial info with each other. They just had no clean way to do it.

What people were doing instead

Phone calls to ask "how much do you have left this month?"

WhatsApp screenshots of bank balances and transactions

Trusting (and hoping nobody was hiding anything)

The opportunity

Kniru already had every user's bank data live in the app. Building a sharing feature on top wasn't the hard part. The hard part was making it feel safe enough that people would actually use it.

Research

Who I talked to

I had informal conversations with friends and people in my network who fit the user profile. Mostly Indian students and young adults who had family money flowing in from abroad or to abroad. I focused on the India side of the corridor. The founder filled in the parent side from his own and his classmates' experiences.

What I asked them

Would you share your bank account details with your parents?

If yes, what parts would you actually be okay sharing?

Would you want them to get a notification for every transaction, or just the ability to check?

What would make you uncomfortable about this?

What I learned

Almost everyone was okay sharing their balance. Very few were okay sharing every transaction. That tension shaped the entire feature. The surprise insight was that students wanted visibility, but not on constant display.

Approach

The biggest call: checkboxes, not "all selected by default with no option to de-select"

The principle behind this decision was User Control and Freedom. The opposite of control is a binary "share everything or nothing" toggle.

Why this matters

If I’d made it all-or-nothing, I’d have been forcing users to choose between "hide everything" and "expose everything." Both options make people uncomfortable. The checkbox approach turned "do you want to share?" into "what do you want to share?" That covered the founder's original concern.

Solution

WhatsApp-style invitations

Mute notifications without losing the data

Revoke and edit anytime

Impact and learnings

I worked directly with Kniru's CEO on this. It taught me how to communicate design decisions to someone who cares about the outcome more than the process. The real takeaway was that a sharing feature is a trust feature. The checkbox versus radio decision changed everything about how the feature felt to use.