Saved by users
The micro-transfer model reached real scale, accumulating over €1.7M in user savings.
This was a savings feature. Underneath it was a question about whether habit and money could share the same trigger.
01
Move & Save was George's first Apple finance partnership. The feature linked Apple Fitness activity rings to automatic savings rules inside the George mobile banking app, Erste Bank's B2C product across CEE. When a user closed a ring, a micro-transfer moved to a savings account. The opportunity was to make saving feel like a by-product of a habit people already had, rather than another task they had to commit to.
02
People were already exercising, and they already wanted to save more. The design problem was making those two things talk to each other. The hardest constraint wasn't the Apple API. It was designing a financial commitment that felt like a reward, not a chore, inside a regulated CEE banking platform where compliance copy, consent flows, and reversibility couldn't be negotiated away. Too much friction and the habit would never form. Too little and the bank's trust framework would break.
03
Lead Product Designer on a team of one PM with embedded UX research and two engineers. I owned the end-to-end iOS experience, from the Apple partnership interaction model through to the in-app savings rules, notifications, and rewards loop. I also led the design relationship with Apple and with compliance, helping the product framing land credibly on both sides.
04
Activity was framed as agency: users defined the rule, Apple Fitness simply triggered it. Every micro-transfer was visible, traceable, and reversible, so the trust contract between user and bank stayed intact. Celebration moments were built around closing rings rather than around monetary milestones, aligning the emotional peak with the behaviour we wanted to reinforce rather than with the transaction. Legally required copy was compressed and repositioned so it informed without breaking the flow of the habit.
05
The feature shipped as George's first Apple finance partnership and produced measurable behaviour change, not just activations. Three outcomes stood out.
The micro-transfer model reached real scale, accumulating over €1.7M in user savings.
Adoption cleared partnership thresholds and validated the feature as a standalone product bet.
Users kept the habit past the novelty window, signalling true behavioural retention rather than launch curiosity.
06
The behavioural insight mattered more than the partnership. What made Move & Save work was not that it connected to Apple Fitness, but that it let users co-sign a rule with their future self and then let that rule disappear into a habit they already had.
Looking back, I would have invested earlier in the rewards layer (the moments after the ring closes, not the moments before), because that's where sustained use was won or lost. I would also push harder on cross-market nuance: CEE attitudes to savings vary more than a single product framing can carry, and the localisation work deserved to start upstream of the visual design.