Xapo Bank: Wealth Management App

Xapo built its reputation on one promise: don't lose my Bitcoin. Famous first as an institutional-grade Bitcoin custodian, it became a fully licensed bank, with members who chose it precisely because it is calm, conservative, and safe. Wealth was the next chapter: helping members grow wealth, not just store it, with investing in 600 assets (whole or fractional shares across stocks, ETFs, and a curated set of cryptocurrencies) inside the bank they already trust.

I shaped the design direction and strategy for Wealth and designed its core flows end to end, partnering with engineering, legal, and marketing, because in a regulated bank, every word on every screen is a compliance conversation.

Investing products usually optimize for engagement: green flashes, streaks, day-trading energy. Xapo members are the opposite audience: long-term, safety-first, allergic to casino patterns. And we shipped into the hardest possible moment: the 2022-23 downturn, when a series of high-profile platform failures had just taught the world that crypto platforms lose people's money.

So the brief was really this: extend the trust of "don't lose my Bitcoin" into "grow my wealth": build access to markets that feels like the bank, at the exact moment trust in the industry had collapsed. Reassurance wasn't a nice-to-have; it was the job.

A cautious member should travel from curiosity to a funded first investment feeling like they're banking, not gambling. Six hundred assets should feel navigable, not overwhelming. And the product had to ship fast, a real MVP in one quarter, without a single corner cut on clarity or compliance.

Six hundred assets is a paradox: enough choice to be a real investing product, enough to paralyze a careful person. The catalog was built to be entered gently: search when you know what you want, curated paths when you don't, and a deliberately selective crypto list rather than an everything-listed free-for-all. Fractional shares lowered the stakes of the first step: a first investment can be small, reversible, and calm.

In a trading app, the hero screen is the chart. In a bank, the hero screens are the ones where money moves. We spent disproportionate design time on the moments where a member's anxiety peaks: funding Wealth for the first time, reviewing and confirming an order, and understanding exactly how assets are held, with the custody story told at the point of purchase, not buried in a help center.

The visual and behavioral language was tuned against the casino: long-term framing over tick-by-tick drama, restrained data presentation, confirmation patterns that slow the member down at exactly the right moments. The measure of success was simple: Wealth had to feel like a room in the same bank, not a door into a different building.

Flows and wireframes came first, pressure-tested with stakeholders and legal before visual design hardened. The MVP shipped in three months by scoping ruthlessly and leaning on system components, which also meant compliance-driven copy changes didn't cascade through the product. The following quarter extended the MVP with additional capabilities on the same foundations, through a company transition and a shifting product map.

Wealth went live on iOS and Android with 600 assets (stocks, ETFs, and curated crypto, whole and fractional), three months from kickoff to MVP, extended the quarter after. Alongside Wealth, I designed the bank's Lightning Network, USDC, and USDT rails inside the regulated wallet. I'm happy to walk through adoption and engagement metrics in detail in conversation.