Digital Gold for India’s Next 100M Investors
Making 24K digital gold accessible, trustworthy, and habitual — for a market where gold is emotional, not just financial.
Low trust in digital gold
Users understood physical gold. Digital gold felt abstract — "where is my gold actually stored?"
One-time purchase behaviour
Users bought once, often during festivals, and never returned. No habit, no portfolio growth.
Complex investment concepts
SIPs, live pricing, vault partners, GST, making charges — too much jargon for first-time investors.
Cultural disconnect
Existing designs felt like generic fintech — not resonant with the emotional weight of gold in Indian households.
Gold occupies a unique psychological space in Indian culture — it is savings, insurance, inheritance, and celebration at once. Research spanned interviews with existing and lapsed buyers, ethnographic observation of purchase occasions, and in-app behaviour analysis.
The biggest barrier to digital gold isn’t price — it’s the feeling that the gold isn’t really yours. Physical gold can be seen, touched, worn, and gifted. Digital gold needed to recreate that ownership.
Live price up front —
buy in grams or rupees
The full math —
offers, GST, total payable
Habit
Turn one-time buyers into systematic savers.
Gold SIP via UPI
Monthly automated purchase from ₹100. Set once — UPI autopay handles the rest.
Daily Savings
Micro-savings from ₹10/day, powered by Jar’s gold stack. 24K accumulation as a daily discipline.
Milestone Nudges
Contextual celebrations — "1 gram saved!", "₹5,000 in gold this year!" — gamified progress.
1.4378gm held — 0.5gm
more to your 2gm coin
Coin complete — the goal
rolls on to a 5gm bar
Delight
Make digital gold feel special — not transactional.
Gold Gifting
Send gold to any PhonePe user for birthdays, Diwali, weddings, with custom greeting cards.
Festival Campaigns
Akshaya Tritiya, Dhanteras, Diwali — themed experiences with auspicious pricing and cultural context.
Physical Redemption
Convert holdings into minted coins and bars delivered to the door — bridging digital and physical.
Convert grams to a
minted, insured coin
Sell anytime — money
straight to the bank
Show the math
Every money screen must show a complete breakdown. If users calculate anything themselves, we’ve failed.
Cultural fluency
Gold is emotional, not rational. Honour its cultural weight while simplifying the mechanics.
Progressive disclosure
First-timers see simplicity; returning users unlock depth. Never overwhelm at entry, never under-serve at mastery.
Reversibility builds confidence
Every action should feel safe to try. SIPs pause, gold sells anytime, savings cancel with one tap.
Financial products need emotional design
The biggest unlock wasn’t a cleaner flow — it was making users feel they were accumulating something meaningful. The animated coin tested better than any data viz we tried.
Transparency is the product
In financial services, trust isn’t a feature — it’s the value proposition. The price-breakdown screens had the highest engagement of any component.
Designing for India means designing for diversity
A tech-savvy user in Bengaluru and a small-town shopkeeper both want to save in gold — but their mental models are worlds apart. We designed multiple entry points into one product.
Partnerships shape the surface
Vault and tech partners meant regulatory constraints, API limits, and brand guidelines. The design had to absorb these invisibly — the user should never feel the seams.