Case Study 02 — Fintech · Savings · Mobile

Vant Savings

Research-led savings vault design — from fintech trend analysis to real-user flow testing that fixed what was blocking adoption.

Role: Lead Product Designer & Product Manager
Timeline: Oct 2022 — Aug 2023
Company: Advant Capitol · Abeokuta, NG (Hybrid)
Platform: Mobile
Tools: Figma · Notion

Vant Savings is the flagship savings product of Advant Capitol — a mobile app where users create dedicated "savings vaults" toward goals. I led both product design and product management: owning the research, the flows, the feature decisions and the delivery with developers.

Savings products have a brutal irony — the users who need them most find them hardest to keep using. My job was to make saving feel less like an obligation and more like progress.

Generic features don't move people. The savings features had to resonate with how our users actually thought about money — not just copy what incumbent apps were doing.
Drop-off at the moment of commitment. The flow for creating and funding a savings vault was the make-or-break moment — and it wasn't working smoothly.
Consistency across devices. A mobile product with visual inconsistencies across screen sizes quietly erodes trust in a money app.

Research — trends in and beyond savings

I researched user trends to ground the savings solutions in real behaviour — what people save for, how they talk about it, and where existing apps lose them. Crucially, I also looked outside the category: studying current fintech trends around loan recovery uncovered an insight that informed one of the product's key savings features.

The most useful product insight came from an adjacent problem — how people behave when repaying loans, not saving money.

Flow design, tested with real users

I created the user flows for the savings journey and tested them with real users — not to confirm my design, but to find where it confused people. The test was simple and ruthless: could a first-time user figure out the goal of the product and complete it without help?

Fixing the friction

Testing surfaced concrete issues in the flows around users successfully creating savings vaults — steps that made sense to the team but not to users. I identified and improved each one, streamlining the path from decision to funded vault.

Delivery — managing the build

I managed the developers throughout development, reviewing builds on real devices to make sure the designs appeared properly across the range of mobile screens our users held. Design QA on actual hardware — not emulators — caught the inconsistencies that would otherwise have shipped.

Friction removed

Identified and resolved the flow issues blocking vault creation — significantly improving the rate at which users successfully created and funded their savings vaults.

Research-backed features

A key savings feature informed by loan-recovery behavioural insights — born from looking outside the category.

Shipped right, on every screen

Designs delivered faithfully across mobile devices through hands-on developer management and device-level QA.

Look at adjacent problems. Loan-recovery behaviour taught me more about savings design than savings apps did.
Test the moment of commitment. The single most valuable flow to test is where the user decides to trust you with their money.
Design QA belongs on real devices. What looks right in a design file and an emulator can still break on the phone in someone's hand.

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