Contovista
Contovista has been developing data-driven white label banking solutions since 2013. Unlocks the power of data to facilitate seamless user journeys and help financial service providers create unique customer value.
Role
Product Designer,
UX Researcher
Team
Front & Back End Developers, Product Manager
Industry
Finance
Year
2025
Overview
Business Goal
Small and micro-businesses run on tight margins and tighter time. Most owners don't have a finance background, and the tools available to them are either too complex, too generic, or live scattered across spreadsheets and bank portals. Decisions get made on gut feel, and surprises hit harder than they should.
Contovista's AI Business Finance Manager (BFM) sits inside the digital banking experience of partner banks. With Financial Key Metrics, we set out to turn raw transaction data into something genuinely useful: clear, automated insights that help owners see how their business is doing, without needing to understand accounting.
Problem
We kept hearing the same thing in research: users don't lack data, they lack understanding of it. Bank transactions told them what happened, but not what it meant. Owners couldn't easily answer questions like "is my cash position healthy?" or "are my costs trending the wrong way?" without exporting data and building their own views.
For the bank, this was a missed opportunity. Sitting on rich financial data but offering only transaction history meant being treated as infrastructure useful, but replaceable. The BFM was the chance to become a strategic partner instead. We needed to translate complexity into confidence.
The Process
Acquire knowledge
We started by mapping the financial reality of small and micro-businesses. Combining qualitative interviews, quantitative usage data from the existing BFM, and external research from sources like Harvard Business School and the Federal Reserve, we built a foundation of validated assumptions before any design work began.
User's Pain Points
Manual calculation and manual excel work: users building their own views with data
Too many tools, lacking one single source of truth for financial data
No clear overview of financial health: hard to answer "Is my business doing well right now?"
Struggles to plan beyond the current month given to the lack of full visibility
Low financial literacy that forces users to rely on a trustee to interpret reports
Lacking some clear guidance and proper recommendations on how to reduce costs and improve their situation
Personas
Target
Micro to small businesses: the segment with the most to gain from clearer financial insight, and the least support available to them. Owners ranging from highly engaged founders tracking cash flow weekly, to those relying on a trustee, to people who knew they should be paying attention but didn't know where to start.
Analysis
We developed four personas spanning different levels of financial literacy and involvement. What they all shared was a desire for a clear, high-level view that told them what was good and what needed attention without forcing them to become accountants.
Business Goal / User Need Fit
The opportunity was to design something simple and educational on the surface, but powerful underneath: meeting non-experts where they are while leaving room for more engaged users to go deeper.
Prototype
Goal
Design a feature that surfaces relevant financial metrics, to give better transparency of the company's financial situation and development, facilitating informed decision-making.
Solution
We mapped each candidate metric to its evaluation method and how users would interact with it: Net Profit Margin, Customer payment Behaviour, Revenue Growth, Expenses, Burn rate, Cash runway, Customer Lifetime Value, Savings Rate, Fixed vs Variable costs. Each one was defined not just by formula, but by how it would tell the user something useful.
Out of all the metrics we explored, two stood out as the most valuable to tackle in the Financial Key Metrics scope:
Cash Runway on the Dashboard: Users see at a glance how long their cash will last, with clear thresholds (risky, recommended, stable) and the option to take action if needed, taking advantage of a list of recommendations provided.
High cash out Detection: When monthly cash out is significantly higher than the previous month (increased >20%), users get a clear, high-signal notification that links directly to the costs that caused it.
Considerations
Designing for non-experts in a space as important as money meant being careful about what we added. The hardest decisions weren't about how things looked, but about what to leave out. Every metric and every detail had to earn its place by clearly helping businesses make a better financial decision.
Conclusions
Impact of the solution
The feature gave Business Finance Manager users a clear, automated view of their financial health for the first time, replacing manual calculations and fragmented tools with insights that fit naturally into their daily banking experience. By providing them recommendations and clear signals, we ensure full awareness of their financial situation and immediate action if required.
Design System contribution
The components used for Financial Key Metrics were added to Contovista's design system, giving the team a reusable foundation for future data-heavy features.
Final thoughts
Design it's about translating complexity into confidence and trusting that a clear view of one number, in the right moment, can change a decision. This project reinforced for me how much impact a designer can have when working close to users, close to engineers, and willing to own the outcome end-to-end.
