Design a finance app for millennials.

Let's start by clarifying the scope of this question. I will make a few assumptions: 

This is a finance app directed at B2C users that are millennials. These millennials want to manage their finances efficiently, so we are talking about the field of personal finance.

I am also assuming that this we are building the app from scratch, and we do not have any existing features. 

The goal of the app is to attract and retain as many users as possible. The app earns money through downloads.

Let's define the user group more closely: 

- Millennials are people from 28-40

- The millennials we are addressing are finance savvy and relatively tech savvy

- They want to take ownership of their financial journey

Now, we can look at potential use cases: 

- The millennials want to know how much money they spend each month versus their budget

- They want to monitor their spending behaviors by category (i.e. "Dining Out", "Activities", "Health", "Gifts"...)

- They want to monitor activity across all of their bank accounts or brokerage accounts in one place. They want an overview of inflow and outflow that is automated so they don't need to track anything manually.

These use cases translate into problems: 

- Budget & Spend tracking app

- Tracking spending habits by category

- Aggregation: Automated tracking of all accounts in one place.

Ranking them by value and effort and alignment with the main goal of retention and attraction: 

The main problem I want to tackle is therefore: 

The automated aggregation. I believe that the spending habits could later be built on top of the aggregation app.

Here some top level requirements for the solution:

- App that integrates with all bank and investment accounts

- User sets the app up once and it tracks all spend automatically

- App refreshes information either automatically or however often the user wants. 

- User can view their net worth and in- and outflow at all times.

- User can analyse increases and decreases in app, for example through a line graph.

This means the main solution is a single source of truth app that gives the user a high level overview of all digital assets.

Drawbacks are: 

- The need to integrate with a large amount of different players in banking and finance

- These integrations are highly customized, so this will require time and resource

- non digital assets need to be tracked manually, if at all

- Security: we need top knotch security and defense feature in order to not compromise on data security. 

- Compliance: we also need to comply with any applicable laws, especially relasted to data privacy, depending on the regions where we launch.

Focusing on this solution, here would be some more details on what the interface could look like: 

The useer will set up all of the integrations with their banking apps once. In the background, the app has permissions to call the banks' APIs for stats and populates them into graphs. Whenever the user checks, they will see a line graph with their asset evolution as well as a pie chart of where their assets are located. They can customize the timeframe and drill down in the reports. They can also increase or decrease the amount of refreshes.

Success metrics: 

We need to measure the number of downloads as this relates to the goal of attraction. Since the app will monetize over downloads, this is my north star KPI. 

To make sure it's durable and more and more users learn about how awesome this single source of truth app is, a secondary metric is activation, i.e. people actively using and interacting with the app after the download. 

This means they are likely to recommend the app and attract more users.

Summary:

I identified the main pain point to address which is viewing all financial assets in one place and tracking them automatically. 

The app will propose a solution to this pain point. I will track  downloads as my primary metric and activation rate as the secondary metric to confirm users are interested in this product (i.e. there is product market fit).