A Monument customer can hold easy-access savings, a Cash ISA, a limited-access saver, notice accounts and fixed-term deposits at the same time. Each has different rules about when money can leave.
I designed the move-money journey from zero so that one action behaves correctly across all five products—without asking customers to learn the rules first.
The resulting journey was adopted by Ecology Building Society and Castle Trust Bank.
Customers can hold all of these products at the same time. Moving money between them is not one operation with one rule, it is five, and they are not symmetric: money goes into a notice account freely and only comes out on a schedule.
The only case where move means move. The money leaves today, which is what every customer assumes is true of all of it, because that is what moving money means everywhere else they have ever done it.
Customers can make three withdrawals a year at the advertised rate. A fourth withdrawal is still possible, but it reduces the rate for the rest of the year. Because the withdrawal is allowed, the consequence can be easy to miss, so the journey has to make it clear before the customer commits.
Customers can add money at any time, but can only withdraw once notice has been served. The same account can be a destination immediately, but only becomes an eligible source when the notice period has ended.
Nothing leaves until maturity. Past the fourteen day funding window there is no route out at all, at any price, which is the hardest thing a savings app ever has to tell somebody about their own money.
The instinct with a rule set this size is to write it down somewhere in the journey and hope people read it. They do not read it, and putting it in front of them makes a two tap job feel like paperwork. So I went the other way.
An account whose money is not available today is not selectable as a source. A notice account appears once the notice has been served or the term has matured, and not before. Nobody gets as far as choosing an option and then gets told no, because the option was never there.
Balance and available, on the same row, at the moment of choosing rather than two screens later. A hundred thousand in the account and a hundred thousand less twenty five pounds available is not a rounding difference to the person moving their savings.
Fixed term and limited access still appear, not selectable, carrying the reason and the date the money frees up. Hiding them completely would make the app look broken to somebody who knows perfectly well that their money is in there.
Every screen below is designed, including the ones nobody asks for. The error states are not an appendix here, they are most of the reason the journey works.
Add money, Move money and Withdraw sit together on the account itself, so From is filled in before the sheet opens and the three things people actually come here to do are named separately. Naming them separately is the point: moving to a notice account and withdrawing to your own bank are different acts with different consequences, and a single Transfer button would have blurred them. Validation waits until someone tries to continue, and then sits under the field that failed rather than in a banner at the top.
The destination list never contains the account being moved from, which removes the one error every transfer form in the world lets people make. Each row carries its own balance and available figure, so the decision is made with the numbers in view rather than remembered from the screen before.
The keypad comes up with the field, and All fills the available figure rather than the balance, which is exactly the difference that catches people out. Go over and the message names the actual maximum instead of saying insufficient funds, so the correction is a number somebody can type rather than a guess they have to make twice.
Everything shown back with an Edit button beside the amount, because the amount is the thing people change their mind about and sending them to the start to change it is how you lose them. After Confirm there is a real wait, so the app says so. If it fails it says what happened, offers the retry, and names the way out if the retry does not work either, which is the difference between a failure and a dead end.
The end-to-end move-money journey was implemented by Ecology Building Society and Castle Trust Bank.
It needs the same care as adding one, and it needs a reason attached. An account that vanishes from a list without explanation reads as a bug to the person whose money is in it, which is why the locked ones stayed visible.
Everyone in the building knows that and nobody outside it does. Printing both, everywhere an account appears, cost almost nothing and takes out a common reason a transfer is rejected.
Insufficient funds tells somebody they were wrong. The most you can transfer is one hundred thousand two hundred and forty two pounds and twelve pence tells them what to type. It is the same information and it is not the same message.