Finch had great onboarding and great retention — but nothing in between. Users opened the app 1.4 times a week, mostly to check balances. Nothing pulled them back in.
- Regulated — every screen needs compliance sign-off.
- Four locales across three scripts.
- iOS-first, Android within 60 days of launch.
I reframed the home screen from 'balance' to 'weekly cashflow'. Every freelancer already does this mental math; we just did it for them — and proactively flagged tax set-asides, invoice follow-ups, and foreign-exchange windows.
- 01
Diary study
Twelve freelancers, four weeks, daily photo-logs. Found that cash anxiety peaked Thursday evenings before the Friday invoice scramble.
- 02
Design system
Rebuilt the component library from scratch — 112 components, semantic tokens, dark mode, RTL-ready. Docs in Storybook, adopted by iOS/Android simultaneously.
- 03
Notifications that don't suck
Shipped rule-based push — 'you've billed 3× more than last week' — not generic 'you got paid'. Opt-in granularity per rule.
“Finance products live or die by the tone of their copy. I rewrote 400+ strings with a copywriter. The redesign's success was 30% UI, 70% language.”
