FINANCEMATE
AI-Powered Personal Finance Assistant
Smarter Budgeting. Simplified.
FinanceMate is a mobile app designed to help users gain control of their finances through AI-powered transaction categorization, proactive overspending alerts, and personalized financial coaching. Built to empower young professionals, students, and families, FinanceMate simplifies money management with clear, actionable insights.
Why Managing Money Feels Overwhelming Today
Managing personal finances today is harder than ever.
Between juggling multiple bank accounts, countless subscriptions, unpredictable family expenses, and conflicting financial advice, people are left feeling overwhelmed and uncertain about whether they’re making the right decisions.
While budgeting apps promise to help, many require constant manual updates and present data in overly complex charts. This results in frustration — and ultimately, abandonment after just a few weeks of use.
“I start budgeting enthusiastically but give up after a few weeks.”
“I don’t know if my financial anxiety is justified or if I’m actually doing okay.”
The Core Issues FinanceMate Solves:
Automation Gap: Most apps rely on users to manually track and categorize spending.
Lack of Context: Current solutions don’t adapt to a user’s unique life stage or financial goals.
Reactive Insights: Users only discover overspending after it’s too late.
Educational Need: Younger users want tools that teach them how to manage money.
“FinanceMate’s mission is to make financial health simple and attainable for everyone — through proactive AI insights, automated categorization, and personalized coaching that empowers users to take control of their future.”
Who We Built FinanceMate For
Understanding the Problem Through Research
“Great products are built on empathy. My first step was understanding the real frustrations and unmet needs people face when trying to manage their finances.”
Before defining FinanceMate’s features, I focused on understanding real users and the financial challenges they face. Through user interviews, surveys, and market analysis, I uncovered key insights that guided the product vision and shaped the MVP scope.
Managing personal finances today isn’t just about numbers — it’s about stress, uncertainty, and complexity. Before defining FinanceMate’s features, I focused on deeply understanding real users and their challenges.
Through interviews, competitor reviews, and persona development, I uncovered patterns of frustration and opportunity that shaped the product’s direction. This discovery phase was critical for building a solution people would actually adopt and trust.
Research Goals
Pain Points
Users overwhelmed by manual budgeting and categorization.
Struggle to track recurring payments like streaming subscriptions.
Anxiety from lack of financial clarity and fear of overspending.
Abandon budgeting apps due to time-consuming updates and steep learning curves.
AI Demand
Users desire automation to reduce repetitive tasks.
Interest in AI-driven categorization that learns and adapts over time.
Preference for proactive alerts that warn before overspending happens.
Curiosity about personalized financial coaching, provided it’s simple and actionable.
Market Opportunities
Current tools are reactive, showing problems after the damage is done.
Lack of contextual, life-stage specific recommendations (e.g., student vs. parent).
Few apps combine education + financial management seamlessly.
Limited customization for notifications and insights, leading to alert fatigue.
Methodology: How We Gathered Insights
To ensure FinanceMate addressed real user needs, I used a mix of qualitative and competitive research methods. These approaches helped me understand behaviors, uncover gaps in the market, and create personas that kept our product focused on people, not assumptions.
User Interviews
Description
Conducted 6 in-depth interviews with diverse target users: 2 professionals, 2 college students, 2 parents. Explored their current budgeting habits, frustrations, and desires for a better solution.
Outcome
Identified key pain points, validated demand for AI-driven automation, and uncovered unique needs for each persona type.
Competitive Analysis
Description
Reviewed 5 top personal finance apps (Mint, YNAB, Rocket Money, Monarch Money, Simplifi) to analyze features, UX patterns, and gaps in proactive financial tools.
Outcome
Discovered opportunities competitors miss, like contextual education and proactive alerts.
Persona Development
Description
Synthesized research data into 3 actionable personas: Young Professional, College Student, Parent. Each persona reflects real motivations, goals, and frustrations.
Outcome
Provided a human-centered framework for product decisions, prioritization, and storytelling.
These combined research methods gave FinanceMate a solid foundation built on user empathy, competitive awareness, and actionable personas. This ensured that every next step — from problem definition to feature design — stayed grounded in real-world insights.
Understanding the market landscape was crucial to positioning FinanceMate effectively. This analysis reveals where established players excel, where they fall short, and how FinanceMate fills critical gaps in the personal finance ecosystem.
Competitive Landscape Analysis
By deeply understanding users and analyzing the competitive landscape, I discovered a clear opportunity: to create a product that doesn’t just track finances, but actively guides and empowers users to take control of their financial journey.
This discovery work formed the foundation for FinanceMate’s problem statement, MVP design, and core feature set, ensuring that every next step stayed user-focused.
Defining the Problem
After conducting interviews, analyzing competitor products, and identifying user needs, it became clear that current financial tools aren’t solving the root problems. Users don’t need more charts and complex data — they need clear guidance, automation, and proactive support to manage their money confidently.
This insight led to FinanceMate’s central mission: simplifying financial health through AI-driven, personalized assistance.
Problem Statement:
Modern consumers are overwhelmed by the complexity of managing their finances across multiple accounts, subscriptions, and life stages. Current tools require too much manual input and only provide reactive insights after overspending occurs, leaving users feeling stressed, disorganized, and unsupported.
MVP Goal
Build an AI-powered mobile app that automatically categorizes transactions with over 90% accuracy, proactively alerts users before overspending occurs, and provides simple, personalized coaching to improve financial habits — all without requiring tedious manual updates.
Key MVP Features:
AI-powered categorization engine.
Personalized notifications for overspending and subscription changes.
Beginner-friendly dashboard with weekly insights.
Simple onboarding process tailored to different personas.
With a clear understanding of our users’ frustrations and a defined problem to solve, we moved forward into planning and designing FinanceMate’s core features, ensuring every decision stayed aligned with our MVP goal.
From Strategy to Structure: Planning the Solution
With FinanceMate’s problem clearly defined, the next step was to translate user needs into a clear strategy.
Using prioritization frameworks, user stories, and early design explorations, I created a roadmap to guide the first version of FinanceMate while staying tightly focused on our MVP goal.
MoSCow Framework
Using the MoSCoW framework, I prioritized features that solved users’ biggest frustrations — automating expense categorization, providing proactive alerts, and delivering simple, actionable insights.
The MoSCoW table created a clear roadmap:
Must-Haves formed the foundation of the app.
Should-Haves added extra value without complicating the launch.
Could-Haves captured future opportunities like gamification and bank integrations.
Won’t-Haves ensured focus by keeping advanced, complex features out of scope.
Low -Fidelity Wireframes
Once features were prioritized, I translated these decisions into early wireframes, visualizing how users would move through the app. These wireframes focused on simplicity and clarity, covering essential flows like onboarding, dashboard navigation, categorization, and notifications.
Together, the MoSCoW framework and wireframes provided a strategic and visual blueprint, aligning the team around a shared vision and setting the stage for FinanceMate’s build phase.
By combining the MoSCoW prioritization framework with early wireframes, I created both a strategic roadmap and a visual guide for building FinanceMate.
This dual approach ensured every design decision stayed grounded in user needs and business priorities, setting the stage for a smooth transition into the Build and Launch phase.
With a clear strategy and design foundation, the next step was to bring FinanceMate to life. This phase focused on turning wireframes into high-fidelity prototypes and building a realistic, clickable experience to validate with real users before launch.
My goal was to create a polished, intuitive interface that reflected FinanceMate’s mission: making financial health simple and approachable through AI-driven insights.
Bringing FinanceMate to Life: Building the Solution
Five Core User Flows
Each flow was designed with simplicity and clarity in mind, ensuring FinanceMate felt approachable for beginners while still powerful for advanced users.
Clickable Prototype
Using tools like Figma, I created a clickable prototype that linked all flows together, simulating the full FinanceMate experience.
This prototype became a vital tool for user testing, stakeholder alignment, and refining the app’s navigation before development began.
With a fully interactive prototype and validated designs, FinanceMate was ready for the soft launch and usability testing phase, where real users interacted with the product and provided feedback that guided final iterations.
Testing, Learning, and Improving
After building a high-fidelity prototype, FinanceMate was ready for its soft launch with real users. I recruited six participants — two young professionals, two college students, and two parents — to test the app and provide feedback on its core flows.
This stage was focused on validation: ensuring the product solved real problems, uncovering usability issues, and identifying opportunities for improvement before a full launch.
"Six users, three personas, five core flows — validating FinanceMate’s design through real-world testing."
"Turning insights into action: how feedback directly translated into meaningful product improvements."
"What worked well, and where we needed to improve — direct feedback from our testers shaped the path forward."
"92% task completion and a 4.2/5 satisfaction score — proving FinanceMate is ready for public launch."
These usability sessions proved invaluable in refining FinanceMate. By continuously learning and iterating, the product evolved into a user-focused, intuitive tool ready for public launch and future growth.
Reflection: Lessons Learned and the Road Ahead
Building FinanceMate was more than just creating a product — it was a journey of growth as a product manager. Along the way, I gained deeper insights into user-centered design, feature prioritization, and the importance of iterative development. These lessons will guide my future projects and shape how I approach complex product challenges.
"The road ahead for FinanceMate focuses on smarter AI, stronger integrations, and engaging ways to help users build lasting financial habits."
"The FinanceMate journey strengthened my skills as a product manager, teaching me the value of empathy, focus, iteration, and storytelling."
FinanceMate began as a simple idea to make budgeting less painful. Through research, design, and iteration, it became a proof of concept for what’s possible when technology meets empathy.
This project not only delivered a functional, user-validated product but also marked a milestone in my journey as a product manager, preparing me to tackle real-world challenges with confidence and vision.