Wise Young Explorer
A mobile app experience designed to get parents to set up the Wise Young Explorer account for their 15 to 17 year olds, focusing on financial education, teen safety and long-term loyalty.
Wise cannot market directly to under-18s, meaning the whole solution had to target parents. The core tension was clear - teens want freedom, parents want reassurance. Research revealed three compounding problems: parental anxiety around teen safety abroad, a systemic lack of financial education in schools, and a generation that has gone fully digital with no fallback when their phone battery dies.
Duration
4 Months
Client
D&AD New Blood 2026 x Wise
Highlights
Full Ownership
Dual-sided system
12 prototype user flows
Presentation
Services
UX Research
Product Design
Interaction Design
Prototyping
The research phase covered secondary domain research across three pillars - Parental Anxiety, Lack of Financial Education and The Tech Reality - before moving into netnography, analysing 20 plus Reddit threads across UK personal finance, parenting and solo travel communities. Affinity mapping grouped 150 plus notes into eight themes, which fed directly into the user personas, empathy maps and dual journey map.
The design phase started with user flows for all ten product features before moving into high fidelity using a rebuilt Wise component library. Key features include a QR handshake onboarding flow giving the teen their own app access, goal-based travel and savings pots with a task unlock mechanic, Wise Academy financial education modules, a live transaction safety map and an offline emergency mode that ring-fences £50 on the physical card when the phone dies.
