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Empowering Financial Wellness Through Scalable Financial Management

Personal Finances is a financial management tool for Experian Consumer Services designed to help users seamlessly manage accounts, categorize spending, and receive contextual insights by bringing clarity and confidence to everyday financial decisions.

Leadership Scope

  1. Led interaction and visual design across web platforms

  2. Owned experience direction for core financial management workflows

  3. Contributed to design system development and scalable UI patterns

  4. Partnered closely with Product, Engineering, and external data providers (Plaid)



Opportunity

How might we help users manage their finances in a unified, intuitive way while building confidence and understanding over time?


Approach

  1. Framed the experience around user needs by grounding the product in three core pillars—organization, financial understanding, and empowerment—based on research insights into fragmented tools and limited user confidence.

  2. Defined a unified, cross-platform experience by ensuring users could manage accounts, view transactions, and track spending consistently across desktop and mobile environments.

  3. Designed contextual support into the core experience by integrating guidance and educational touch-points directly into workflows rather than separating learning from action.

  4. Iterated on core financial workflows by refining account linking, transaction categorization, and alert systems to reduce friction and improve usability across scenarios.

  5. Addressed data quality challenges head-on by introducing user feedback mechanisms for incorrect transaction categorization and partnering with Plaid to improve accuracy and responsiveness.


Key Decisions

  1. Prioritized unification across platforms to reduce fragmentation in financial management

  2. Embedded education within workflows to build user confidence over time

  3. Introduced user feedback loops to improve data quality and system reliability


Outcome

  1. ~400,000 users acquired during beta

  2. ~950,000 financial accounts connected

  3. Strong early engagement across account tracking and transaction visibility


Scaling Impact

This work required setting direction across a new product space, aligning user needs with technical constraints, and building systems that balanced usability, data complexity, and scalability.



©2026 • Elliot Yamashiro