A wallet for people who don't speak crypto

Most crypto wallets are built for people who already live in that world. Finestt aimed for the opposite end of the market: people who don't think of themselves as crypto users at all. The brief was to build a wallet that felt as familiar as a banking app. Send money by phone number, invest funds and earn interest on a balance, all with the complexity hidden.

I came onto the project once the brand was set. I took the finished brand, a set of colours, typography and logos handed over by the team, and shaped the product around it: the UX, the features and the UI for a native iOS app and web app. From there I built the web apps frontend and handed it to the Finestt team to wire into their backend and carry forward.

The workshop the team ran had set the brand and the positioning, who Finestt was for and why, but not the product itself. My job was to translate that strategy into something real: the structure, the flows and the working prototypes everything else would be designed and built from.

With no existing users to learn from, the research leaned on our own experience. Having used plenty of web3 wallets ourselves, we already knew the problem firsthand: they are powerful but intimidating, and for the audience Finestt was chasing that complexity was the thing to design out. To pin down what simple should actually feel like, we reviewed highly rated banking and finance apps and studied the flows behind them, picking apart what made them effortless and what users clearly responded to.

That pointed to a structural decision early on: compartmentalise the product, with a clean split between everyday funds management and the investment side so neither overwhelmed the other. I settled that structure in wireframes before moving into detailed design.

With the structure set, the goal for the UI was familiarity. Users coming from mainstream banking apps expect banking patterns, so I designed to meet those expectations rather than reinvent them. Guided walkthroughs carry first-time users through anything unfamiliar, and plain language replaces the jargon most wallets lean on.

The everyday-money and investment sections stay visually and structurally distinct, so the approachable side never feels weighed down by the complexity of investing. I designed it as a native iOS app, then built the web app frontend myself so the polish survived into the live product, before handing over to the Finestt team to wire into their backend.