Persona 01
Sam
Product manager in New York on $90 to $120K. Carries multiple rewards cards and works each one for what it gives back. Abandoned Mint because aggregating his cards duplicated transactions.
Rewards-driven
Already taps to pay
ModFi
A $4.1M seed round closed on the prototype and pitch deck we designed, and ModFi's patent portfolio is now licensed to a global technology leader.
Modfi
·
fintech
·
MVP - User Research - UI/UX Design
At a glance
A three-month scope that never stopped growing.
MAR 2020
APR 2020
APR – MAY 2020
MAY – DEC 2020
2021 ONWARD
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5 roles
Strategy, research, design, front-end, and QA on the team
2+ years
A three-month scope, renewed month after month
4 surfaces
Mobile app, web app, marketing site, and pitch deck
1 system
One shared design library across all four
The Client
A hardware company that had never built software.
ModFi had spent a decade on the device and the intellectual property behind modern payments. The product those filings were meant to live inside did not exist yet.
ModFi began life as Edge Mobile Payments, a San Francisco fintech founded in 2017 around a single physical object: an NFC device meant to carry every card a person owns. CEO Peter Garrett is a career hardware engineer with a long list of patents to his name. In 2017 the company acquired the technology of Plastc, a smart card startup that had taken customer pre-orders and never shipped, and in 2018 it acquired a wearable IoT payments and cloud wallet patent portfolio from Nexus Payments.
By early 2020 the device worked and the patents were filed. The software did not exist. The company rebranded from Edge SmartCard to ModFi, short for Modern Finance, and set out to build the platform the device was supposed to plug into: an aggregator of banks, credit cards, budgeting, rewards, and peer-to-peer transfer. Internally the ambition was described as being the Netflix of finance.
Art director Leigh Erickson came to WANDR in February 2020 asking for mobile app, website, and browser extension design. On the first call it was clear the company needed something earlier than design. It had not yet decided what it was selling, to whom, or at what price.
2017
Founded as Edge Mobile Payments, in San Francisco
10+ years
A fintech patent portfolio, filed before any software existed
Patented
Technology across Cloud Wallet, wearable NFC, smart cards, and checkout
The Challenge
The hardware was ready. Nobody could say who it was for.
A decade of patents, a working device, a fresh name, and no defined MVP, no validated audience, and no agreement on how any of it would be priced.
Problem 01
No MVP, and no validated market.
ModFi wanted to target “everyday consumers.” Target audience, positioning, feature priority, and pricing were all still open, and the team was actively debating whether the app should be free plus paid or free plus two tiers. Nobody could name the first hundred users.
Problem 02
Four products with no shared foundation.
A mobile app, a marketing website, a browser extension, and the physical device were being pursued in parallel, with no common user experience, no design system, and no research any of them shared.
Problem 03
Most of the interface could not be changed.
The banking layer ran through a bank program manager's API. Only two areas were genuinely ModFi's to design: accessing rewards and switching cards. Everything else had to be built inside somebody else's constraints.
Problem 04
The brand carried inherited damage.
The acquisition that gave ModFi its hardware also gave it the history of a smart card startup that had taken pre-orders and never delivered. The words “plastic” and “card” were off limits in every piece of copy and branding, which removed the two most obvious ways to describe the product.
Problem 05
A physical product, and nobody could be in the room.
The engagement kicked off on 30 March 2020, at the start of the lockdown. A device whose entire appeal is the feeling of holding and using it could not be put in front of a single research participant or investor. Every demo, workshop, and test had to work through a screen.
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Our Role
Not a vendor. The missing half of the team.
01
A two-day remote design thinking kickoff with the ModFi founders and their advisory team
02
Problem topology, scoping canvas, empathy mapping, and a Lean UX canvas to frame the work as a business problem rather than a design brief
03
Assumption mapping across four clusters, with every hypothesis written explicitly to be validated or killed
04
Secondary research validating each hypothesis line by line against published data, marked validated or not yet validated rather than assumed
05
A survey to ModFi's own beta-tester list, used both to test the assumptions and to recruit interviewees
06
Primary research: nine deep interviews with target and extreme users, plus a card-sorting exercise
07
Expert research: three interviews plus a panel of millennial fintech and product professionals
08
A competitive matrix across Chime, Mint, Venmo, Cash App, Zelle, Varo, SoFi, and Credit Karma
Research
Forty surveyed, twelve interviewed, to find one buyer.
The survey went to ModFi's own beta-tester list, the people who had already raised a hand for the product. Forty answered, twenty were invited to a 1:1, and the study closed with nine deep interviews across target and extreme users, three fintech expert interviews, and a panel. The question was never whether people wanted better financial software. It was which of them would pay for it.
01
CONSOLIDATION
Nine in ten named app sprawl as their biggest pain.
90% of the target segment ranked having separate apps for budgeting, investing and payments above every other financial frustration. Interviewees were running four to seven accounts, each with its own login. One had gone back to a manual spreadsheet because nothing on the market gave an accurate picture.
02
PAYMENT HABITS
The segment already paid with their phone.
Seven of eight used Apple Pay, Google Pay or Android Pay. Eight of eight held a credit card and three held four or more, averaging 2.25 payments a day. Published research agreed: 72% of US mobile payment users were millennials or Gen X.
03
TRUST
They felt safer managing money than spending it.
On a five-point scale the segment rated confidence managing their finances 4.1, but security in their means of payment only 3.6. The opening was real: 81% of Americans aged 18 to 34 said they would consider a financial product from a technology company over a bank.
Three very different relationships with money.
Persona 02
Angela
College senior in Ann Arbor on about $15K part-time. Low financial literacy, high social spend, lives on Venmo. Believes saving is not possible while she is still in school, so she does not try.
Venmo-native
Needs a teacher
Persona 03
Lia
Business consultant in Leawood on $120 to $150K, in a $300K household. High income and high debt. Relies on an advisor, and wishes she could see the whole picture herself.
Advisor-led
Wants one view
Stop selling a device. Start selling the end of app sprawl.
3 Principles →
01
Pick the buyer, not the market.
ModFi arrived targeting everyday consumers and college students who would never pay. Research named the segment that would: financially intentional millennials, roughly 30 to 35, in technology-adjacent work, already carrying multiple rewards cards and already comfortable paying with their phone. The MVP was scoped to them and nobody else.
02
Segment the
landing experience.
Casual, cash-game, and bingo players don't share a funnel. We built differentiated entry paths so each audience sees what matches their motivation.
03
Design bingo as
its own product.
Bingo has its own demographic, competitive landscape, and purchase behavior. It gets its own landing page strategy — not a shared one.
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THE KEY INSIGHT
They were not selling hardware. They were selling permission to stop worrying.
ModFi spent a decade solving a physical problem: too many cards in one wallet. Fifteen million Americans carry seven or more, so the problem was real. But it was not the one people described. In interview after interview, nobody complained about the thickness of their wallet. They complained about seven passwords, four apps that disagreed with each other, no accurate number in front of them, and a constant low hum of not knowing where they stood.
That reframing changed the product and the pitch at the same time. The device stopped being the thing being sold and became the proof that the software was real. ModFi went to investors describing a consolidation and education platform with hardware attached, rather than a smart card with an app attached. It is a much easier story to fund, and it was the true one.
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Outcomes
What the work produced.
ModFi started with a device, a patent portfolio, and no answer to the question of who it was for. It finished with a named buyer, a defined MVP, a designed product across three surfaces, and the investor materials that carried it into a raise.
01 · FUNDING
$4.1M
Seed round raised
on the prototype and pitch deck we designed
on the prototype and pitch deck we designed
02 · VALIDATION
15/15
Users validated prototype as optimal for everyday use
03 · DEFINITION
0 → 1
An MVP defined and designed from a device with no software and no audience
04 · TRUST
5.0
Verified client rating on Clutch, after a two-year engagement
Figures from qualitative user testing conducted during the engagement. In-market performance validation sits with MPL's internal team post-handoff.
Client Voice
In their words.
“
We appreciate their adaptability and the way they go with the flow of new ideas we throw at them. They do quality work, and always help us solve challenges that arise. They are agile and accommodating to our specific needs.
Leigh Erickson, Creative Director, ModFi
Verified 5.0 review on Clutch