FIRST$AVER
Release Date
2024
Client
oct 2024
two users
A seven-year-old in Singapore today may never queue at a bank, never fill a deposit slip, never count change. Money arrives on cards and moves through QR codes. But the accounts banks offered families hadn't caught up: built decades ago around a parent and a passbook, they treated the child as a name on a form rather than a customer. First$aver set out to close that gap, giving kids a genuine first banking experience and giving parents a reason to trust it.
A twelve-year-old and their parent open the same app wanting different things. The child wants to feel trusted: their own balance, their own card, money that responds to them. The parent wants to know nothing can go wrong: every transaction visible, every limit set, savings that a scammer or a moment of impulse cannot empty.
The work started with visual research into two products that had already put banking in young hands: POSB Smart Buddy and Revolut's Kids & Teens account. I studied how each designed for a young user: how Smart Buddy turned school pocket money into something a child tracks and saves through the app, and how Revolut built an experience where the child, not the parent, is treated as the primary user.
They marked out two very different answers. First$aver's answer would be different again: not a separate kids' app, but the same SC Mobile experience, simplified and quietened down for a first-time banker, with the parent keeping full oversight from their own app.
Exploring what savings goals could look like
From there I went deeper on the feature I cared most about: savings goals. I ran a UI study across goal-tracking patterns, from banking apps to explorations on Dribbble, looking at how a goal could feel playful rather than transactional: progress you can watch, milestones worth celebrating, goals with names like a bicycle or a class trip. The study explored how far colour, illustration and motion could go for a young user while keeping the trust cues a parent expects from a bank.
From this research I conceptualised the goals journey and the kids' home screen, a quieter, pared-back take on the SC Mobile home, then designed the full post-onboarding account experience, both sides: the parent's oversight of transactions, top-ups and Money Lock, and the child's view of their balance, transactions and card. The goals designs made it to the finish line. The development timeline didn't, and goals were cut from MVP1.
Cutting a finished feature is its own kind of design work. The youth experience had been composed around goals as its heartbeat, so I rebalanced it around what remained: savings you can see, transactions you can follow, a card that's really yours. Nothing in the shipped journey could hint at the feature that wasn't there.
One account, two journeys after the sign-up
My scope on First$aver began where onboarding ended: once a parent had opened the account, everything both users see and do was mine to design. That meant two of everything: two home experiences, two mental models, two definitions of success.
I mapped the parent's journey across allowance top-ups, transaction monitoring, and locking their child's savings with Money Lock to protect them from scams; and the youth's journey from receiving their card to spending and tracking on a simplified SC Mobile interface. I carried both through stakeholder reviews, compliance, and handoff to build, aligning with a second designer who owned the new-to-bank and existing-customer onboarding journeys that bring parents into the product.
Kids' View:
Banking, Simplified
Parents' View:
Full Oversight
Safety
by Default
First$aver went live in October 2024, opening in minutes through MyInfo. It was built to grow up alongside its owner: the card, cashback, and mobile access switch on at thirteen, so the account opened for a primary schooler quietly becomes a teenager's daily bank.
What stays with me from this project is the discipline of the cut. Finished designs are not shipped designs, and when goals fell out of MVP1 my job became making the smaller product feel whole rather than mourning the bigger one. The goals work is done and waiting, and it's the feature I'd fight for in MVP2: a balance teaches a child what they have, but a goal teaches them what saving is for.
