Pouch.
A budgeting app that makes spending a habit, not a guilt trip.
- Client
- Halo Bank
- Platform
- iOS, Android
- Timeline
- 16 weeks
- Year
- 2025
- monthly active users
- 640K
- weekly return rate
- 58%
- Google Play rating
- 4.8
For Halo Bank’s younger customers, we took budgeting out of banking language. A weekly “pouch”, automatic categories and gentle reminders made it the bank’s most-opened product.
The challenge
Halo’s existing budgeting tools read like a statement: accurate, monthly and easy to ignore. Customers under thirty opened them once, saw a red number and never came back.
What we did
We replaced the monthly budget with a weekly pouch: one amount, one bar, reset every Monday. Transactions sort themselves through open banking, and reminders are written the way a friend would write them. We A/B tested tone as seriously as layout.
The outcome
Pouch became the most-opened product in Halo’s app family, with 640 thousand people using it every month and more than half of them returning every week.
Scope
- Product design
- React Native
- Open banking integration
- A/B testing
Colour palette
- #D9E6CF
- #2F7D4F
- #16241A
- #F7F8F4
- #F2B84B
What made the difference.
- 01
A week beats a month
Short cycles mean a bad week resets on Monday, which keeps people coming back instead of giving up.
- 02
Categories that sort themselves
Open banking data is classified automatically, with a one-tap correction the model learns from.
- 03
Tone, tested
Fourteen reminder variants ran head to head. The kindest one won by a wide margin.
Up next,
Atelier.
A marketplace and seller dashboard for people who make things by hand.