As the previous Chief of Staff at Magna, I was responsible for managing the $17MM raised. Toggling between banking applications, I realized it was complicated to consolidate the necessary information needed to make investment decisions.

Role: this is a concept project where I assumed the role of both the UX and UI designer.

Cash management in young startups is often left to the Founder, Chief of Staff or COO. These roles often require constant context-switching. Managing idle cash is often an afterthought, yet is an overlooked strategy to extend a company’s runway.

Given that the neo-bank application space is an increasingly saturated space, and that competing over marginal interest rates is a zero-sum game, there is an opportunity for applications to differentiate themselves user experience.

Analyze what is currently offered in the market

Understand who in the team makes decisions

Understand the financial literacy of the decision-maker

Understand how decisions are made

Interviewing several Founders and Chiefs of Staff surfaced 3 main themes:

Cash management, while a nice to have, is often an afterthought.

Cash management (often referred to treasury management), is usually handled by the founder or the Chief of Staff / COO.

Operators in early-stage companies often have minimal understanding of how to optimize cash management based on the macroeconomic environment

Operational cash flow and having a buffer to cover expenses for the next quarter is the biggest consideration, more so than yield generation

To minimize the mental energy needed to make investment decisions, I wanted to surface key factors that affect decision-making. For operators working on cash management, these are: historical liquidity requirements, buffer to cover operating costs, available investment options and the yield curve.

For the UI, I adopted a bento box design to form content blocks and use white space to reduce visual clutter for what would otherwise be an information-dense page.

Operators have a vast spectrum of financial literacy. However, they are happy to maximize yield as long as they have a buffer for operating expenses. There is an opportunity for banking applications to differentiate themselves by streamlining the investment process to optimize yield generation by reducing the level of financial knowledge needed to achieve this goal.

While including financial terminology is important for the copy to be accurate, making definitions accessible and underlining goals rather than technical names provides non-financially savvy users a better user experience.

It is important to understand the full process and factors that go into decision making when designing a tool that has significant functional implications.

As an extension to the project, a usability test would be a great way to validate whether the proposed design is an improvement to the current options in the market