BANCO GALICIA · 2024 · PRODUCT DESIGN
Argentina's first bank-built PFM
Native Personal Finance Manager, with automatic credit card categorization — something no other PFM had achieved in Argentina.
30-second summary
PROBLEM
Customers were already tracking their finances in Excel, notebooks, and WhatsApp. The bank had all the data but wasn't giving it back to them.
WHAT I DID
I designed Argentina's first native bank PFM, automating transaction categorization including credit card purchases — the technical challenge no competitor had solved due to how settlements work in the country.
RESULT
Launched to production with a CSAT of 3.5/5 across 183 responses in a Friends & Family launch. Validated demand and left a prioritized improvement backlog.
THE PROBLEM
The problem
Galicia had more than 3 million active app users and a clear goal: increase daily usage frequency and cross-sell with other tools. But the app remained mostly transactional — you'd open it, pay, and leave.
Research revealed something compelling: customers were already doing the work of managing their finances, just outside the app. In Excel, notebooks, agendas, financial planners, or WhatsApp messages to themselves. Manual, fragmented, error-prone.
The technical differentiator no one had closed: in Argentina, credit cards are the hardest purchase type to automatically track — due to how purchases, installments, and billing cycles work. Existing PFMs lived in digital wallets where that problem doesn't exist. No traditional bank had managed to automate this. That was the real opportunity.
THE RESEARCH
The research
Process
- —Qualitative interviews with users aged 18 to 65.
- —Observation of financial routines: how they manage income, savings, and spending.
- —Guerrilla testing at branches with low-fidelity prototypes to validate in real context.
Research Overview Ideal — background, analysis, and detected profiles.
Four key findings
- 1.Manual and fragmented management — Excel, notebooks, agendas, WhatsApp.
- 2.Continuous checking — they opened the app several times a day to monitor transactions, especially card activity.
- 3.Monthly pattern — beginning of the month for fixed payments, rest of the month for discretionary spending and savings.
- 4.Low financial literacy around investing — fixed-term deposits or dollar purchases as the dominant savings method.
Research showed us something simple but compelling: people were already doing the work. We just needed to make it easier.
Four profiles of relationship with money
The Saver
Every peso goes straight to the piggy bank. Spends only on essentials and prioritizes saving toward a goal: a trip, monthly dollars, a fixed-term deposit.
The Bon Vivant
Spends on dining, outings, and pleasures. Uses money as a tool for enjoyment, not planning.
The Promo Hunter
Organizes their spending around discounts, cashback, and benefits. Knows which day which supermarket works with which card.
The Family
Plans vacations, anticipates large expenses, looks for benefits. Manages finances with a long horizon and multiple shared priorities.
In the process
THE DECISIONS
The decisions
Five decisions that defined the product.
Automatic credit card categorization
The hardest technical decision and the one that defines the case. I worked with analysts and developers to build the logic that interprets credit card purchases and assigns them to categories without manual input from the user. This was what no one had solved — and what justified Galicia entering a space where fintechs were already playing.
Benchmarking outside the banking world
Since there was no bank PFM in Argentina to compare against, I took references from digital wallets and global fintechs. I adapted the data visualization language to the banking context (more conservative, with users of lower financial literacy) without losing the visual clarity of modern apps.
Three wireframe iterations for the Investments screen.
Three views in one screen: Income, Expenses, Investments
Separated by tabs to avoid cognitive overload, but accessible in one gesture. With ARS/USD currency selector — essential in the Argentine context.
Accessible iconography and color system from day one
15 categories with simple, encapsulated icons. Alternative palette when brand colors didn't meet contrast. This ended up becoming a small system now used by other bank products.
Monthly view by default, not weekly or daily
Research showed users think about their finances in monthly cycles (payday → fixed expenses → the rest). Forcing that view respected the real mental model.
THE IMPACT
The impact
Due to BCRA regulatory constraints, a mass launch wasn't possible from the start. We opted for a controlled Friends & Family launch to gather real feedback before a general rollout.
What users said
VALUED
Category separation, control over credit cards, visual clarity.
PAIN POINTS
Performance on certain screens, duplicate expenses in specific cases, webview instead of native in some sections.
KEY SUGGESTIONS
Category customization, more flexible filters, downloadable reports.
Synthesis of 183 responses grouped into impressions, features, performance, proposals, and technical issues.
What I took away as a designer
- —Launching with F&F + Hotjar instead of waiting for a closed high-fidelity test gave me more real feedback in much less time. I adopted it as a practice for subsequent projects.
- —The CSAT seemed low at first glance, but qualitative analysis showed the pain points were technical, not conceptual. The product worked — the implementation needed adjustment. That learning sparked the next case — the AI-assisted semantic CSAT analysis.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
What happened next
The project went on hold due to Galicia's acquisition of HSBC, which redirected the bank's product efforts toward customer migration. Now, with those customers already integrated, there are plans to reintroduce the PFM across other products and reinterpret the categories.
