Budgets: A better way for business customers to manage expenses
August 2022 - February 2023
Designing a new balance architecture for businesses to separate funds and manage team expenses across multiple currencies on one Wise account.
Team
Wise 🇬🇧
Working from Wise HQ in London as a Staff Product Designer.
Collaborators
Nick Jarzembowski, Florian Cochard, Chee Xuan Tang, Suthagar Kailayapathy
Platform
Web
Contributions
Information architecture design, Visual design, Interaction design, User research, UX Design
Money across borders
Founded as Transferwise in 2011, Wise is one of the worlds largest fintech companies, with over 16 million customers (300K+ active business customers in 2023) around the world. The company started out as a simple way for people to make cheaper transfers abroad, but with the introduction of cards and the business product, Wise has since grown larger than just a money transfer company.
Today, Wise enables businesses and consumers around the world to send, receive, hold and spend money in several currencies from the same account.
Goal
Create a product that gives Wise business customers more control over how they hold & spend money and what can be accessed on their account.
Outcome
We built a feature that allows business to group currency accounts, team members and cards for different use-cases. Launching the beta to 100 UK business just before the end of Q4 2022.
Money across balances
While the average consumer is satisfied with one card and one pot of money, most businesses require more control to manage their finances and what can be accessed on their account - depending on the level of trust. There have been numerous instances where business customers have had to create multiple Wise accounts as they have different use cases and can’t achieve these complex international cashflow management with one Wise account.
The idea to build Groups comes from the knowledge that this inability to offer customers better financial control could very well prove to be a blocker to mass adoption.
Ground work
There had been extensive market research, documentation and several conversations on this feature for at least 2 years before I joined as things tend to move a lot slower at larger companies. The team had the basic idea, the proof of market fit and the numbers to back up their assumptions and just needed product and design ownership to get the engineers up and running, and with support from the rest of the team, this is what I was able to offer.
I reviewed some early design explorations and ideas for the feature and worked closely with the engineers to scope a new flow and architecture that we would be able to implement using only components from Neptune (Wise’s design system).
Spend Business engineers presenting the proposed architecture to the rest of the squad after tech-scoping
With the existing Wise account architecture, business profiles have one multi-currency account (MCA) with multi-user access (MUA), this means that businesses can add employees directly to their Wise account as sub-profiles and allow these employees order expense cards. However, the issue with this is that when employees spend from their cards they spend directly from the company’s main balance, where the only level of control from the business owner would be to set spending limits for each employee. This doesn’t mirror the way most businesses work.
Groups solve these problems by allowing businesses create a sub-account nested within their Wise profile, where they can add money, and add employees that would have access to spend this money instead of spending from the main balance.
Early explorations for the structure of Budgets (Groups)
Architecture of a Budget