Mavan Financial

Mavan Financial is a bank I made up in 2021, so I had something to design against. I set the brief myself, with no client. The bank sells five things: accounts, cards, investments, loans and insurance.

The question came from a senior executive where I worked at the time. I had been asking people about their banking apps, and the question came back at me.

Two of the pains I wrote down stayed with me. People did not understand how their app was put together, and they could not find the one action they needed in a hurry. Both of those are the navigation’s fault.

The map ran to eighty services in five columns: banking, lending and deposits, investments, insurance, and everything else a bank puts its name on. I counted them off that map, my own drawing of the industry.

I laid the same bank out three ways. A side sheet puts every destination behind a hamburger, so the list grows every time the bank sells something new. A card home makes the first screen a directory, and a visitor reads the lobby before doing anything.

The third changes the bar with the product you are in. All three were drawn and put in front of people.

The bar has five seats. Seat one names the product you are in and opens the switcher, seats two to four are that product’s own actions, and seat five is More, which holds what every product shares.

In Accounts the middle seats read Overview, Pay and Services. In Cards they read Overview, Rewards and Services; in Invest, Explore, Portfolio and The Wall; in Loans, Explore, Repayment and The Wall. Adding a sixth product costs three labels.

Insurance is a tile in the switcher and a block on the overview. I never designed past that.

The first prototype dropped straight into Accounts. The people I showed it to came back with two versions of one question. What if I want to land on my investments instead, and how do I see how everything is doing without walking through every product?

The account overview is the answer. It is the page after login: balances, subscriptions due, what each card owes, the week’s profit and loss, the loans. Each block opens into its own product.

A visitor can reorder that feed or drop a section out of it. Someone who never looks at loans stops being shown loans.

Payments is the one flow I took to the end. Pay opens on a code to scan, the quick actions and the people paid before, with businesses, bills and subscriptions below.

Services holds what a branch usually handles: bank to bank transfers, quick deposits, cheque services, ATM cash, a banker’s cheque, a demand draft, and the emergency actions for blocking a card or freezing payments.

Transactions lists what has gone out, and one transaction opens to a receipt to share and a dispute to raise. The rest of the app is screens, not flows. What I never worked out is trust and security, which is where a real bank would have started.