Led design at Ivella and released the Split Account, Ivella’s first core product, designed to help couples their share expenses & start building their financial future together.
Role
Stats
Context
What's Ivella?
Problem
The Couples Aren’t Alright
A study conducted by The Harris Poll found that 36% of couples interviewed stated that money caused the most stress on relationships, with younger adults (18-54) were almost twice as likely (44% vs. 23%) to cite money as the top stressor than older adults (55+). Often, these couples are splitting 20-30 transactions a month with apps like Venmo and Cash App.
Venmo-ing each other becomes quite tedious after some time but couples have limited options if they want to share finances. For those that are just beginning a relationship, opening a joint account together can be a massive commitment and comes with a few questions - how much does each partner contribute? What if one earns more than the other? What do we split and what do we keep separate? The Split Account was designed to be a stepping stone for couples in between those stages, allowing them to automatically split transactions while maintaining individual accounts & balances. For many of our users, the Split Account’s the first financial product they’ll ever use together.
Features
Balance Cards
Quickly glance at important aspects of your balance and relationship directly from the Activity page like account & routing numbers, low-balance alerts, ATMs and your Split Ratio.
Safe to Split
We created “Safe to Split” to clearly show couples the most they can split on a single transaction by taking the two individual account balances, the account ratio, and calculating the most they can spend before either person’s balance zeroes out.
Transactions
Something unique to our Split Account is, well, splitting - set a ratio that determines how much each partner contributes and we’ll automatically split every transaction along those lines. Either partner can go back and change the split of any individual transaction at any time and we'll instantly re-adjust your balances. If your partner didn’t have enough to split a transaction, you’d temporarily cover the full amount while we notify them to add more money to their Ivella account.
Savings Pods
Couples could create up to 500 different accounts and customize each one with its own emoji, name, color, or goal to help them easily save towards whatever they’d like all while earning 5.15% APY at its peak. We later introduced Cash Funds as an extension of Savings Pods, where couples could send a unique link to a specific Pod and allow friends and family to contribute towards whatever the goal might be (i.e weddings, fundraiser, emergencies). Couples could also add text descriptions, media, and custom messages to better engage with their audience.
Budgeting
All of your transactions are automatically categorized behind the scenes, making it easy to view your spending for the month or across different categories, and set budgets for the ones you want to track. Tapping any category shows month-to-month spending, partner breakdowns, and transaction history within the category.
Switching Accounts
Couples already on the Split Account can switch to a Joint Account in just a few taps. Ivella will combine your two individual balances, create new physical and virtual cards, move any recurring transfers and low-balance alerts over and update Ivella’s interface within minutes. accordingly. update your app interface!
North Star
Imagining the Future of Ivella
We’ve explored future products like Personal & Family Accounts and how it would’ve looked to use more than one Ivella product at a time.
Personal Accounts would be the go-to individual checking account, whether you’re single and want to eventually share finances with your partner or already have a Split or Joint Account and want the convenience of having all of your banking under Ivella.
Family Accounts would further expand the ecosystem and allow parents to open checking accounts for children under 18 and easily transition into their own Personal Account when that time would come.
This was Ivella’s end game, to be there for every step of a couple’s relationship and and support them on their financial journey.
💜
