Wells Fargo · Fargo
Transforming Fargo from reactive to proactive.
A scalable system of personalized insights designed to help Fargo deliver timely financial guidance before customers had to ask.
27M
users engaged
+77% growth
10×
increase in yearly interactions
25M → 247M
550M+
yearly interactions
2025
The opportunity
Moving beyond reactive assistance.
Fargo was already helping millions of customers complete tasks and find information through conversation. But the experience was largely reactive: customers had to recognize a need, open Fargo, and ask the right question before it could help.
We saw an opportunity to make that relationship more proactive. By using signals already available within a customer's financial activity, Fargo could surface useful information at the moment it became relevant—without waiting for the customer to ask.
That shift also addressed a broader product goal: increasing engagement with Fargo by creating more reasons for customers to return and interact with the assistant over time.
Customers have to ask for help.
The customer needs to ask.
Fargo can only respond after the customer initiates the conversation.
Fargo brings relevant guidance before the customer asks.
01
Financial trigger
A signal in the customer’s financial activity.
02
Opportunity identified
Fargo identifies a relevant moment to help.
03
Insight surfaced
Timely, personalized guidance is surfaced in Fargo.
04
Customer engages
The customer is informed or takes action.
More opportunities to provide value. More reasons to engage.
The system
Designing a framework for proactive guidance.
The challenge wasn't designing a single financial insight. We needed to define how proactive guidance would work within Fargo across many different financial moments.
That meant designing the underlying model as much as the individual interfaces: how insights were triggered and prioritized, how customers discovered them, how new and previously viewed information behaved, and how an insight connected to the deeper experience behind it.
The initial system brought these pieces together through a carousel within Fargo, giving customers a consistent way to discover relevant information, understand why it mattered, and choose whether to explore further.
That foundation allowed the team to introduce different kinds of financial guidance through a shared interaction model rather than treating each new insight as an isolated feature.
A unified system for delivering the right insight at the right time.
Financial signals moved through a shared delivery model that determined what was relevant, how it should surface, and how the experience changed after customers interacted with it.
01
Trigger
Meaningful signals in the customer’s financial activity enter the system.
02
Prioritize
Signals are evaluated to determine what is most relevant now.
03
Surface
The selected insight is delivered with clear messaging and context.
04
Engage
Customers explore further, take action, or simply stay informed.
05
State
New and viewed states help organize what the customer sees next.
One delivery model connecting financial signals to relevant customer experiences.
Working artifact
Early insight delivery flow.
This working flow explored how multiple insight types moved through the experience—from entry and prioritization to delivery, customer interaction, and viewed state.
Explored
Prioritization, delivery behavior, entry points, interaction, and state management.
Early model
The initial concept used a carousel to organize and surface multiple insights within Fargo.
The experience
Evolving the experience after launch.
Launching Insights established the foundation, but the experience continued to evolve as customers used it and the product grew.
New insight types were introduced over time, expanding from eight at launch to more than 15. Existing insights were also continually refined—from the information they surfaced to the deeper experiences customers reached after engaging with them.
At the same time, we continued iterating on the experience that brought those insights together. The original carousel eventually evolved into a grid-like view that made a growing collection easier to scan and created clearer separation between new and previously viewed information.
The work became an ongoing design effort across multiple levels: improving the overall Insights experience, introducing new financial use cases, and refining the individual experiences already available to customers.
Original experience
Carousel delivery
Focused on one insight at a time.
Evolved experience
Grid-based organization
Easier scanning with clear new and viewed states.
The expansion
Extending insights beyond Fargo.
Insights initially lived within Fargo, but the underlying idea had broader potential: relevant financial guidance didn't always need to wait for customers to open the assistant.
As the product evolved, insights began appearing contextually within other areas of the Wells Fargo app. A customer completing another task could encounter relevant information within that experience, creating new entry points into Fargo's proactive guidance.
This extended the original idea beyond a single destination. Fargo could increasingly provide assistance in the context of what customers were already doing, bringing proactive guidance closer to the moments where it could be useful.
Inside Fargo
A dedicated destination
A centralized place for proactive insights and guidance.
Across the app
Guidance in context
Relevant insights appear within other journeys, bringing guidance closer to what customers are already doing.
Impact
Turning proactive guidance into meaningful engagement.
The shift toward proactive experiences changed how customers engaged with Fargo.
Increasing engagement was one of the project's core business goals, and the change was measurable from launch. Fargo had approximately 25 million yearly interactions before Insights was introduced. Following the launch, yearly interactions grew to 247 million—a nearly 10× increase—as proactive experiences gave customers more reasons to engage without first having to formulate a question.
The results demonstrated that the shift toward proactive assistance wasn't only a change in the customer experience. It also delivered against the engagement goals that motivated the work.
2023
Before Insights
25M
Yearly interactions
Fargo was primarily reactive. Engagement depended on customers initiating conversations.
2024
Insights launch
247M
Yearly interactions
Insights launched in early 2024, contributing to a 10× increase in annual interactions.
2025
At scale
550M+
Yearly interactions
Proactive engagement continued to grow as the experience expanded.
Customers engaged
27M
customers engaged
+77%
growth
Reflection
Designing for the product Fargo could become.
The most important outcome of the project wasn't any individual insight. It was helping establish a new behavior for Fargo: identifying moments when it could be useful and initiating the interaction itself.
That required thinking beyond the immediate interface. Decisions around prioritization, state, entry points, and deeper experiences needed to work together while leaving room for the product to continue evolving after launch.
The results validated the approach from both sides. Customers increasingly engaged with proactive experiences, while the growth in Fargo interactions delivered against the business goals that had originally motivated the work.
For me, the project reinforced the value of designing beyond the immediate experience—creating something that solves a customer need, delivers measurable value to the business, and provides enough flexibility to keep evolving after launch.