01 · Translate the commitment
Rupee and gram modes accommodate two ways of deciding: how much to spend and how much gold to own.
Entry 03 · PhonePe · Wealth · Tenure 2019—2025
Making Digital Gold Feel Understandable and Worth Returning To
Making 24K digital gold accessible, trustworthy, and habitual — for a market where gold is emotional, not just financial.
PhonePe ConsumerFintech · WealthTrust DesignBehaviour Design
500M+
Platform Users
₹10
Minimum Investment
24K
Gold Purity Guaranteed
Leadership brief
Make ownership clear before asking people to invest again.
- My remit
- Product Design Manager on PhonePe’s consumer wealth experience, spanning first purchase, repeat saving and access to holdings.
- Product scope
- Rupee and gram entry, payment, savings progress, gifting, physical redemption and selling.
- Leadership contribution
- Connect transaction clarity with an understandable ownership model, while preserving a visible route back from the commitment.
The problem was a gap between knowing gold’s cultural value and trusting a digital holding. The design response needed to explain what a purchase creates, how progress is represented and how the holding can be accessed.
Decision in practice · Product experience
From the problem to the screen.
02 · Show progress in a familiar unit
The coin milestone turns a digital balance into a recognisable goal. It is a representation of progress, not evidence of better investment returns.
03 · Keep access visible
Selling and physical redemption belong to the ownership journey. Confidence should include knowing how to access the holding, not only how to buy more.
Strategic decisions & trade-offs
What the direction needed to balance.
01Balance simplicity with understanding
Keep first purchase approachable while making the quantity, quoted price and payable amount understandable. Removing detail is not the same as reducing uncertainty.
02Make progress tangible without overstating value
Use grams and coin milestones to connect a balance with ownership. A milestone can encourage saving, but the experience should not imply that progress guarantees a return.
03Connect repeat use to customer control
Recurring savings, gifting, selling and redemption serve different intentions. Treat them as a connected ownership experience rather than judging every screen only by purchase conversion.
01 — Overview
Gold is emotional. Design has to honour that.
01
Low trust in digital gold
Users understood physical gold. Digital gold felt abstract — "where is my gold actually stored?"
02
One-time purchase behaviour
Users bought once, often during festivals, and never returned. No habit, no portfolio growth.
03
Complex investment concepts
SIPs, live pricing, vault partners, GST, making charges — too much jargon for first-time investors.
04
Cultural disconnect
Existing designs felt like generic fintech — not resonant with the emotional weight of gold in Indian households.
02 — Research
Understanding India’s relationship with gold.
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.
Key Insight
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.
01 · Price
Live price up front —
buy in grams or rupees
02 · Math
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.
01 · Goal
1.4378gm held — 0.5gm
more to your 2gm coin
02 · Next
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.
01 · Mint
Convert grams to a
minted, insured coin
02 · Sell
Sell anytime — money
straight to the bank
05 — Design Principles
Rules for designing financial trust.
Show the math
Every money screen must show a complete breakdown. If users calculate anything themselves, we’ve failed.
Cultural fluency
Gold carries practical and emotional value. Respect both while making ownership, charges and access understandable.
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.
Outcomes & learning
What the results establish.
Reported results include 80% growth in first-time buyers, a 57% increase in recurring-saving setup and an 18% improvement in 30-day repeat purchase. These are shared experience-level results. They do not establish that the coin milestone or any individual component caused the change.
The leadership lesson is to define trust as something the product helps a customer understand: what they own, what they are committing to and how they can access it.
06 — Outcomes
Impact at scale.
Gold Adoption
SIP Conversion
Repeat Purchase
80%
Growth in first-time gold buyers post-redesign
57%
Increase in users setting up Gold SIP or Daily Savings
18%
Improvement in 30-day repeat purchase rate
Reported outcomes for the redesigned PhonePe gold experience on Android & iOS. These are team-level results; they do not isolate the effect of an individual design change.
07 — Reflections
What I learned.
Financial products need emotional design
The biggest unlock wasn’t a cleaner flow — it was making users feel they were accumulating something meaningful. Visible progress connected the digital balance to a recognisable ownership goal.
Transparency is the product
In financial services, trust isn’t a feature — it’s the value proposition. A complete price breakdown makes the commitment easier to understand before purchase.
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.