# Monie

By Munawar Khel / Day One Technologies / Lead UI/UX Designer / 2020–21 / 7 min read

Published at https://munawarkhel.com/work/day1-technologies/monei/

Shipped a consumer fintech app that unifies spending, sending, budgeting, analysis, and saving in one account, taken from the client's concept through to a live product

- Company: Day One Technologies
- My role: Lead UI/UX Designer
- Timeline: 2020 – 2021
- Platform: Mobile (iOS) and responsive marketing website
- Category: Consumer Fintech / Mobile App and Marketing Website / Neobank
- Status: New design, delivered
- Tools: Sketch, Overflow, SF Pro / SF Compact type system, Photoshop
- Team: Lead designer owning end-to-end UI/UX, with several designers contributing wireframe and design-direction variants, and iterative client reviews

## Context

Monie is a consumer fintech app that brings a spending account, a card, and everyday money-management tools into a single mobile experience. Its promise, stated across onboarding and the marketing site, is to let people control their finances with one account for budgeting, spending, and sending, staying "always in control of your money." The headline benefit is simple: control your daily expenses better, powered by instant, real-time transfers between Monie accounts at no extra fees.

The product was built for the Egyptian market, with balances in Egyptian pounds, phone-number onboarding, and local merchant and location examples, and it was pitched around financial wellness for everyday users rather than finance experts. Day One Technologies was the design partner and the work ran as an end-to-end engagement: turning the client's early concept into wireframes, exploring several high-fidelity directions, converging on a final design and a reusable design system, and designing a responsive marketing website to launch the product.

Before the project, the target user's money life was scattered across a bank, cash, ad hoc tracking, and separate transfer tools, with little visibility into spending and no simple way to budget or save toward a goal. Monie set out to collapse all of that into one approachable app.

## The problem

Everyday consumers who wanted to manage their money well were juggling disconnected tools and opaque banking. Spending, budgeting, saving, and sending money lived in different places, so there was no single view of where money went. People had little insight into what they spent, on what, and with whom, and no easy way to set and hold a budget. Sending money was slow and carried unpredictable fees, which the product answered with instant fee-free transfers and a promise of fair, fixed pricing and no hidden fees. And saving happened, if at all, without structure, with no motivating way to put money aside for a specific goal inside the same app people spent from.

Two further tensions shaped the work. First, the product had to earn trust as a money app, which meant secure but friendly onboarding and login, while still feeling effortless for a mainstream, finance-averse audience carrying genuinely sophisticated capabilities like analytics, per-category budgeting, and goals. Second, the design had to converge a client and a multi-designer team, several people were producing wireframe and direction variants, onto one coherent visual language before committing to a final build.

## What I did

The core idea was a single mobile money app, backed by a marketing website, that unifies spending, sending, budgeting, analysis, and saving under one account with a clear, approachable interface. One account and card sit at the center (total balance, top-up, transactions), surrounded by the four money jobs a person actually has: sending, through instant fee-free peer-to-peer transfers between Monie accounts; understanding, through categorized transactions plus a spending analysis and insights view; controlling, through per-category budgets with live progress tracking; and saving, through goal-based Money Box savings kept separate from the spendable balance. Every transaction is enriched with category, merchant, location, receipt, notes, and a split-the-bill action, so a raw feed becomes something users can actually learn from. Onboarding and login were designed to build trust fast, with phone-number verification, memorable-information login, and Face ID.

Reaching that product was itself a method. Rather than commit to one look early, I turned the client's concept sketches into structured wireframes, then produced several distinct high-fidelity design directions, including full light and dark theme studies, so the client could compare complete experiences before converging on a final direction and a reusable design system. A responsive marketing website was designed in parallel to introduce the product and drive early sign-ups ahead of launch.

## Outcomes

- Shipped a consumer fintech app that unifies spending, sending, budgeting, analysis, and saving in one account, taken from the client's concept through to a live product
- Delivered a complete mobile app design spanning onboarding and authentication, account and card, top-up, peer-to-peer transfers, enriched transaction detail, spending analysis and insights, per-category budgeting, goal-based Money Box savings, notifications, and statements
- Built a reusable Sketch design system and shared component library with full light and dark themes on Apple's SF Pro and SF Compact type
- Designed a responsive marketing website that launched the product with feature sections, an app showcase, a how-it-works flow, and an early-access contact form
- Converged a client and a multi-designer team on a single visual language through several complete design directions and light and dark theme studies
- Localized the product for the Egyptian market (Egyptian pounds, local phone onboarding, local merchant and location examples)

## Decisions

### One account unifying spend, send, budget, and save over separate tools

What: Designed a single account and card as the center of the app, with sending, spending analysis, budgeting, and goal-based saving all built on top of the same money.

Alternatives: Leaving these as the separate tools users already juggled, a bank for balance, a transfer app for sending, and ad hoc tracking for budgeting and saving.

Why: The fragmentation was the exact problem the product existed to remove. Unifying everything on one account gave users a single view of their money and a single place to act, which is the core promise of a personal-finance app.

### Enriched, categorized transactions as the backbone of analytics and budgeting

What: Made every transaction carry category, merchant, location, receipt, notes, and a split-the-bill action, and used that structured data to power the analysis, insights, and per-category budget features.

Alternatives: A plain chronological transaction list with separate, manually maintained budgeting and analytics.

Why: Insight and budgeting are only as good as the data underneath them. Enriching transactions at the source turned the feed into the engine for analytics and budgets, so users got understanding and control without extra manual work.

### Goal-based Money Box saving separated from the spendable balance

What: Designed a dedicated savings space where users create named goals with a target and progress (for example a trip), and add or withdraw funds separately from their main balance.

Alternatives: Treating savings as just another number inside the main balance.

Why: Money that is visibly spendable tends to get spent. Separating goals into their own space made saving deliberate and motivating, and fit the product's financial-wellness positioning.

### A systematic multi-direction and light and dark theme study to converge the client and team

What: Explored several complete high-fidelity design directions and full light and dark theme variants rather than proposing a single look, and designed a pre-launch marketing website alongside the app.

Alternatives: Committing to one direction early and iterating only within it, and treating the website as a later, separate effort.

Why: With a client and multiple designers producing variants, showing complete experiences side by side made the tradeoffs concrete and let everyone align with confidence, while designing the launch website in parallel meant the product and its go-to-market story were shaped together.

## What I learned

Structured data is what makes a money app feel smart. The features users value most, spending insights and budgets that actually hold, are only possible if the transaction data underneath is rich and categorized from the start. Designing enrichment into the transaction itself, rather than bolting analytics on afterward, was the decision that made everything downstream work, and it taught me to design the data model, not just the screens.

On a long, multi-direction engagement with several designers, structured comparison prevents churn. Presenting one look invites subjective debate, but rendering complete directions and full light and dark themes side by side gave the client and the team something concrete to choose between. Turning "which do you prefer" into a real comparison of finished experiences was the single most useful move for converging a group without circling.

Designing the product and its launch story together pays off. Because the marketing website was designed alongside the app rather than after it, the value propositions, the feature framing, and the visual language stayed consistent from the first landing-page scroll to the in-app experience. Shaping go-to-market and product in the same motion made both stronger.

Tags: Information Architecture, Design Systems, Wireframing, User Flows, iOS, Mobile, Marketing Website, Landing Page, Component Library, Payments, Fintech, Data Visualisation