Introducing Cash App Families To Investing
The introduction of family accounts on Cash App led to 1M+ accounts in the first quarter of its launch. Providing teens access to Cash App had led to increased adoption across several product surfaces (specifically banking). The launch of Families provided a new audience to build product functionality for, and the Investing Team saw it as an ideal audience to expand to.
By enabling teens to invest on the platform, we would build functionality for teens and their parents. This surface would need to strike a balance for teens to feel they could buy and sell stocks freely, while giving parents the necessary level of supervision (and control) over their child's financial well-being.
We developed a set of clear product goals to enable investing on Cash App for parents and teens:
- Provide Teens the ability to buy and sell traditional stocks
- Provide Parents the ability to view their teen’s investing activity, and set & adjust their teen’s monthly spending limit on stock purchases
- Set clear expectations for both Parents & Teens on what their accounts can do (in terms of functionality) and prepare them for any tax liability associate with the sell of stocks
Reviewing Competitors Experiences To Understand Investing Functionality
When reviewing the experiences from competitors several things became clear. The majority of financial tech companies focused on audiences 18+ and had not yet positioned their product to be focused on teens. This would give Cash App an advantage at capturing a new and growing audience.
Additionally, while reviewing competitor’s experiences I found that the time required to go from sign-up to investing was always behind a wall of screens and verification flows that often lacked context on why this information was required or how long it would take to complete.
The language across these forms rarely educated people on what to expect from the process, and often led to new customers experiencing wait times to ensure their brokerage account was set up properly and led to people being forced to complete 40+ screens and often spend over 15 minutes before they could actually invest in stocks.
Breaking Down The Complexities Around ID Verification For Banking & Investing Products
With the process of completing ID Verification playing a huge role on if and how the product could be used we needed to have clear requirements around what layers of verification would be needed based on the type of user that was in the product.
We distilled the requirements into flows that could impact a matrix of different edge cases that included family accounts that could fit into the following criteria:
- Existing / New Cash App Customers
- Existing / New Family Accounts
- Accounts With / Without Banking Verification
- Accounts With / Without Brokerage Accounts
Leveraging Product Research As A Way To Understand Family Dynamics Around Finances
While functionality would need to be explicitly laid out across the ID Verification flows, there was still plenty of opportunity to better understand how families would use and ultimately adopt investing surfaces.
I partnered with product research to define a series of questions that could help us to better understand teens, parents, and their relationship to investing.
Criteria for the study included both parents and teens (sometimes multiple teens in a household) and consistent of a 90 minute study with 30 mins for the household and 30 mins individually with a parent and teen.
Parents —research questions
During research sessions with parents we wanted to understand the following:
- How are parents currently teaching their children about how to invest? Were their products, tools, or resources that they used to familiarize themselves with Investing
- How comfortable were parents with their teen’s having access to investing? How much visibility did they expect to have into their teen’s financial behavior?
- With the proposed designs, did parents understand how to add or remove controls and feel like the designs accomplished the tasks?
Teens — research questions
During research sessions with teens we wanted to understand the following:
- How comfortable were teens with saving, spending, and investing? What were the ways they currently tracked and managed finances? What was a challenge versus straightforward to them?
- What were the aspects of investing that were most interesting to teens? What did they hope to learn through investing
- With the proposed designs, did teens feel comfortable buying and selling stocks? What were their thoughts about parent supervision, and their parents having access to this type of information
Through conversational interviews our research lead distilled a series of insights specific to how teen’s begin to develop their understanding around spending -> saving -> investing and lead to valuable iteration on how controls could evolve as a feature.
Insights Based on Research & Testing
Research provided insights into behaviors around teens, parents, and their families — I also gained insight into how to improve the design of investing controls for parents.
Key takeaways included:
Teen’s Understood How To Buy & Sell — Teens found the process of buying and selling stocks fairly straightforward, they were able to successfully complete the action every time
Clarifying Language & Actions Around Parental Controls — When we highlighted the settings and controls of Teen’s Investing to parents they provided valuable insight that more clarity in language like “Allow Investing” & “Monthly Limit” would provide clarity for the task at hand
Viewing Teen’s Activity Was Great But Monthly Limits Were Preferred — Highlighting a teen’s activity was great, but providing clarity around monthly limits and keeping them fairly low was a preference by almost all parents who participated in the study
Investing Education Was Most Valuable Tool — While we didn’t highlight screens around investing education, this was the number one resource that both parents and teens requested. They wanted to better understand how to invest, gain insight on how to grow their investments, and understand the tradeoffs when holding stocks versus selling them.
Delivering Product Synthesis & Designs
Based on the research synthesis, I took the designs through an additional iteration focused on ensuring that the language was reflective of the requirements (alongside content design) and delivering a refined design for parental controls on investing. The designs were then handed off to the larger product team which was inclusive of my cross functional Head of Product, content design, and engineering.
