A fintech product that had never rewarded its users

Moneyview's platform had one incentive mechanism: referrals. No rewards program, no internal currency, no systematic way to celebrate user behaviour across their growing product suite — lending, banking, digital gold, UPI.

The business case was clear: reward users for exploring multiple products, reduce CAC, and create a flywheel that keeps users returning. But no one had done the hard work of answering the human question first: what does it feel like to earn rewards on a financial app?

The differentiator

Unlike most reward programs, Mcoins could be converted to real cash — withdrawn directly to a bank account. This wasn't just points. It was money. The content had to make that feel real, and trustworthy, and exciting.

The mandate

Content-first. The story, strategy, and language had to exist before screens were designed. UX, IA, and visuals were built around the content — not the other way around.

Fintech rewards speak to wallets. We needed to speak to people.

A competitor analysis revealed a consistent pattern across the rewards landscape: functional language built for conversion, not connection. The industry default was cold, transactional, mechanical.

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Content-first meant the story came before the screens

This wasn't the typical UX writing workflow — receive wireframes, write copy, hand back. The content strategy was the foundation everything else was built on. The process ran in this order:

1. Competitor study: Audited rewards language across CRED, Flipkart, Google Pay, Paytm, Navi, PhonePe. Identified the emotional gap: functional competence, zero delight.
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2. User empathy mapping: Mapped five distinct user states — first-timer, waiting for rewards, has enough to redeem, doesn't have enough, has used up all rewards. Each state got its own emotional profile, tone of voice, and storyline.
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3. Naming the currency: Developed and evaluated six name candidates for the internal currency, with strategic rationale for each. Recommended Mcoins — brand-anchored with a cash connotation.
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4. Content strategy & copy system: Built a full copy bank: banner headlines, CTAs, earn nudges, redeem states, empty states, low-balance recovery messages. Each with tone guidance and intent rationale.
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5. UT methodology design: Designed the usability testing framework — objectives, cohorts, tasks, and eight distinct metrics including content comprehension score and information retention rate. Ran 15 in-depth sessions in November 2024.
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6. Post-launch analysis & recommendations: Tracked earn and redemption data post-launch. Synthesised UT findings into four specific product recommendations.

Five emotional states. Five distinct voices.

A rewards product isn't a single experience — it's a sequence of emotional moments. A first-timer needs curiosity and trust. Someone with enough coins to redeem needs excitement and permission. Someone short of the threshold needs encouragement, not shame. I mapped each state separately and gave it a different content direction.

Naming the currency

The internal currency needed a name that felt cashlike, brand-owned, and emotionally light. I evaluated six candidates before recommending Mcoins.

The copy system in action

Every piece of copy was written with explicit intent — not just tone guidance but a specific emotional job it needed to do. Here's a selection from the earn and redeem states:

The copy landed in the product exactly as written

The video below show the shipped product. The copy you see — headers, labels, CTAs, state messaging — maps directly to the content strategy.

Usability testing: what held, what didn't

I designed and ran a 15-person usability test in November 2024 — three cohorts, two tasks, eight metrics. The test was semi-moderated with participants segmented by product history and reward familiarity.

100K+ users earned. The earn engine worked at scale.

Context on the redemption number

The 0.05% redemption rate isn't a content failure — it's a structural feature of Phase 0. The product intentionally set a minimum threshold of 50–100 Mcoins before redemption unlocks, to create an accumulation flywheel. Most users hadn't yet crossed the threshold. The earn engine worked at scale. The next phase was designed to make the goal state feel worth accumulating toward — something the UT had flagged as an opportunity.

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What I learned

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