Proactive Insight Messaging
Senior Lead Product Designer
Transformed Fargo from a reactive assistant into a proactive financial advisor by introducing a scalable insights system that surfaces timely, personalized financial guidance.
+77%
1st time users
25M → 247M
yearly interactions
550M+
projected interactions
Insight presentment expanded across multiple surfaces in the app
The Problem
Fargo was designed as an AI-powered assistant, but in practice it behaved reactively - only responding when users asked questions.
This limited engagement and created a gap between the product vision (proactive financial guidance) and the actual experience.
My Role
Led end-to-end design of the insights system - from concept through launch.
• Defined the interaction model and delivery framework
• Partnered with PM to shape product direction and requirements
• Designed scalable patterns top support multiple insight types
The Shift
We introduced Insights - a system of proactive messages triggered by signals in a user’s financial activity.
The goal was to surface relevant, timely information without requiring users to initiate interaction.
Designing the System
Rather than designing individual alerts, we created a flexible system for delivering insights across contexts.
• Algorithm-triggered insights based on account activity
• Multiple entry points (proactive + user-invoked)
• Prioritized delivery based on relevance and urgency
My Role
From its inception Fargo was positioned as an artificially intelligent financial advisor that would provide assistance and information to users. At launch however, Fargo essentially only responded to the user’s queries. In collaboration with a product manager we wrote up requirements for an ‘insight engine’ which would look at the user’s accounts and derive ‘insights' to keep the user informed with key events that have taken place or by looking at trends and making simple predictions.
Once the requirements for the project were approved I worked on the design for the system itself as well as the user experience.
Design
While the insights themselves are triggered by algorithms looking for specific events in a user’s profile or accounts, from the perspective of the user the insights are essentially a messaging or notification system. The requirements called for mechanisms and indicators for ‘new’ and ‘viewed’ insights. We also needed to have old or irrelevant insights either decay or disappear over time to make sure users didn’t get presented with out of date information.
Along with the design for the framework, the team has designed and iterated on more than 12 bespoke insight experiences.
Results
Since the launch of insights in early 2024, Fargo engagement metrics have increased dramatically.
27 million users have tried Fargo at least once. This number has grown by +77% since the launch of insights.
Yearly Fargo interactions on 2023 (year prior to insights) topped at 25 million. On 2024, predominantly fueled by insight interactions, Fargo totaled 247 million interactions. In 2025 Fargo interactions are on track to close at 550 million by the end of the year.
Fargo insights have performed so well that we have also started to present them in new places across the Wells Fargo app.
