Finch (formerly TRIO)

Finch, which started life as TRIO, is a consumer fintech mobile app that merges banking and investing into a single account. Its promise, stated plainly on the first onboarding screen, is to let people earn investment returns on the money in their checking account. Instead of parking spending money in a bank that pays nothing and opening a separate brokerage to invest, a user keeps one balance that works across a simple three-part portfolio of Stocks, Bonds, and Cash, the trio the original name pointed to, and still spends from it day to day.

The product sat in the challenger-bank and micro-investing space, where a wave of apps was trying to make investing approachable for people who had never held a brokerage account. Day One Technologies was the design and product partner, and the work ran as a sustained engagement rather than a single handoff, evolving across roughly three years from the first design rounds in late 2018 through a full rebrand from TRIO to Finch and a shipped product.

Everyday consumers who wanted their money to grow faced a fragmented and intimidating experience. Spending money lived in a checking account earning nothing, while investing meant a separate brokerage or robo-advisor, manual transfers between the two, and a mental context switch every time. Onboarding named the barrier directly, "find investing tough," because portfolio construction, asset allocation, and performance tracking were unfamiliar territory for the mainstream audience the product was built for.

Two constraints shaped the design. First, the product had to make real investing mechanics, allocation across asset classes, returns over time, and rebalancing, legible and unthreatening to people with no finance background, without dumbing the product down for the users who did understand it. Second, it had to hold one coherent mental model across two jobs that are usually separate apps, a spendable checking balance and a managed portfolio, so a user could always trace where their money was and what it was doing. All of this had to survive a long, iterative build with multiple design directions and a client who needed to see and compare options before committing.

The core idea was a single account that is simultaneously a spending account and a managed three-bucket portfolio, wrapped in an approachable interface that made investing feel effortless. Every balance was transparently split across Stocks, Bonds, and Cash and shown through donut and a custom triangular allocation chart, so the trio split was legible at a glance, and the same money powered a full Spend experience of transactions, deposits, and transfers so users never moved funds between apps. Performance was made tangible through a Past, Present, and Future model that turned abstract returns into a simple time series with Day, Week, Month, Half Year, and Year ranges and a per-asset breakdown of gains. Deep settings and security reinforced the trust a money app has to earn.

Reaching that product was itself a method. Rather than commit to one look early, I explored several distinct design directions and ran a systematic color and theme study, rendering the entire flow side by side across multiple palettes so the client could compare complete experiences instead of isolated screens and converge with confidence. The chosen direction was then carried into a full high-fidelity system, an interaction and motion layer, a defined component and icon set, and finally a brand evolution from TRIO to Finch.

Making a hard domain feel easy is a design problem before it is a feature problem. The instinct with a fintech product is to expose capability, but the audience here was defined by avoidance, they found investing intimidating. Reducing the whole idea to three buckets and a simple past-present-future view did more for adoption potential than any additional feature would have, and it taught me that for a mainstream money app, restraint and legibility are the product.

On a long, multi-direction engagement, structured comparison is what prevents churn. Presenting one proposed look invites endless subjective debate, but rendering the full flow side by side across several complete color and direction options gave the client something concrete to react to and choose between. Turning "which do you prefer" into a real comparison of finished experiences was the single most useful move for keeping years of iteration converging instead of circling.