Written by: Anna Waack, Marina Moreira, Arthur Romero, Monique Sena, Cris Leão, Gabriela Susin, Marco Nicolodi, Thiago Wittmann

In 2018, Nubank launched a feature that allowed users to save money while making it yield: ‘Guardar Dinheiro’, which means exactly “save money”. Later that year, our clients helped us notice the necessity for separate and organized savings.

Listening to their feedback, we brought ‘Caixinhas’ in 2022, a feature in which customers are able to personalize their goals in multiple boxes, but also to count on different, pre-suggested investment products, that adds a yielding potential to their savings. 

We’ll be here telling a story on how we’ve created a new experience of saving money, helping people to achieve their dreams in a simple, tangible and innovative way. In this article, you can find a summary of the learnings of a multidisciplinary team, composed of Product Designers, UX Researches, Content Designers, Product Marketing Managers, Business Analysts, Product Managers and Software Engineers. After all, working at Nubank is all about collaboration!

A long-term need combined with a huge opportunity

As a company that puts its clients first, Nubank heard their user wishes to organize the money they save. But Nubank is also a company that dedicates itself to deliver more than what our users ask us for. We aim to empower and to give the control over their financial life back to them. So we delivered a brand new experience that ended complexity and provided guidance for more strategic decisions related to saving and investing.   

(…) It’s all about balancing user and business needs, because this is where opportunities rest.

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Bringing a better experience to users 

Our project was born with research, using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. First of all, we needed to understand what the investment world looked like in Brazil and how it was related to the savings universe. 

What we discovered didn’t come as a surprise: ‘Poupança’ is still Brazil’s favorite investment product, both in awareness and number of users. Customers don’t necessarily comprehend deeply how it works, but they have enough trust to concentrate their savings in it. 

Despite not having a good yield and actually making customers lose money in the long term (due to inflation), Poupança is highly adopted because it feels safe and easy to use一 and this was a first good learning for us: the saving experience has to be safe and easy.

On the other hand, we had the investment world with its complexity, lots of rules and tiny letters that most people don’t understand, or just don’t want to spend time struggling to find out which option suits them better. 

How could we make this experience simple and easy? 

We identified that the major pains and needs of people who tried to enter investments were not knowing how to start and how to proceed, so most of them ended up believing that they didn’t belong to the investment’s world. So, through these investigations, we defined to whom our solution would be designed for: people who need guidance and prefer to have someone helping on what’s best for them. 

With the first prototypes at hand, we were able to do concept research, which is a qualitative research in which we talked with different behavior segments to gather insights on the proposed solutions. We have learned a lot from this research, refined our main ideas, corrected concept and usability issues that weren’t clear to customers

Last, but not least, we later ran usability tests to guarantee that we would be coding something adequate to our customers. We believe research is a continuous process and even after launching Caixinhas, we kept running different methodologies to capture the real feelings and insights of each stage of the product cycle.

Emotional connection, immersiveness and abstraction: how to communicate this narrative?

Minimum lovable product 

After understanding user and business needs, we needed to define what was the minimum set of features that was capable of both delighting the customer and validating the hypotheses created to the product for the long run. We can mention three pillars that were considered for Caixinha’s first release:

  • Goal orientation: Investment is a journey to enable life accomplishments, so we wanted this feature to separate their different plans, allowing customers to commit more to their dreams.
  • Personalization: Saving is an emotional action, and we allowed the definition of different naming and pictures for each goal, to strengthen this connection.
  • Guidance: Choosing an investment option can be hard and scary, so we decided to attach the Caixinhas to some investment products, which will be pre suggested 一according to the customer’s goals and backed up by Nu’s financial specialists.

Enhance confidence 

Words can sink a project down. When used correctly, they create connection, but when used inappropriately, they can cause what no one wants in a financial app: suspicion.The distrust level among Brazil’s mass population is increasing as we speak. One way to improve trust is to decrease cognitive strain. We did that by being simple and human:

Can it be understood on the first read? Is that how people say it? 

To answer those questions, we are constantly talking with our customers to make sure we are using their words. We believe that ‘plain language is not dumbing down’, it’s opening up.

We understand that vocabulary and technicalities are putting people away from finance. And, with Caixinhas, we wanted to change that. We discuss, test and iterate. Use the power of great information hierarchy and disclosure information.

Our main goal is to make sense, to make the unclear clear, to replace jargon for conversation and relate to people’s emotions during their journey with. This makes the user journey intuitive, and not suspicious. 

We did that by working together with our Legal team and getting consolidated feedback from all stakeholders, leveraging their expertise in user experience. 

Behind the curtains 

Saving money in Caixinhas is so magical and intuitive! What a joy to see our clients seamlessly going through the designed flows and seeing their money yield. But what happens behind the scenes?

Caixinhas were constructed based on the systems that already existed to support our investment products, but with some major adaptations:

Engineering

Before that, a customer could buy different assets through the investment experience, but all of their shares, values and yield would be put in a single “bucket”. With Caixinhas, this experience changes. Now, it is possible to separate the custody of a single asset into many different caixinhas, each with their own yield, movements and even product offers and conditions.

Thinking about that, we adapted our systems with the concept of portfolios, that works just like sub-accounts: when a customer purchases some funds quotas to a vacation Caixinha, for example, the resulting quotas and yields will all be related to a specific portfolio (exclusive to this Caixinha). With that, we can guarantee that there will be no confusion about where the money belongs, even when a customer has many Caixinhas with the same asset underneath.

These adaptations required a lot of coordination between different teams. Given the necessity, the Caixinhas team had the autonomy to explore many possibilities and proposed changes to the teams that owned each different affected service. After some discussions and whiteboarding sessions, all teams could agree on an approach and worked together to implement and deploy the final solution, adapting the systems that were already being massively used by millions of customers.

Building a major launch

For sure, even if you don’t have a Nubank account, you have probably heard of Caixinhas, right? Or knowing there’s a new way of saving money at Nubank? Maybe you saw Anitta talking about saving money for your plans. If you answered yes to all of these, then yes, you have been impacted by one of Nubank’s biggest launch campaigns this year.

Ok, but how did it happen?

Planning process

The launch of Caixinhas went through an intense planning process. This process included defining the channels (where and how we will act with social media, direct communication, paid media, blog posts, PR, among others) as well as structured messages for different segments.

Since Caixinhas is a innovative product, we chose to go in a wide range of channels, dividing the launch process into 3 parts during the months of September and October, delivering different messages and actions and thus ensuring that we would move our awareness (many people knowing the product) and conversion (many people using the product) numbers.

What did we learn?

Caixinhas is a big project. It was a challenge and a joy to have launched it — and to keep evolving as well. But it doesn’t exist on a limbo, this means collaborating with others. We know that making our product building process diverse and collaborative enables great products to be launched. 

When we put together a multidisciplinary group of talented professionals eager to deliver great solutions to challenging problems, there is no big or small project. There’s an outstanding project that will positively impact and change Nubank clients’ financial lives, one launch at a time.

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