<aside> 🏦
| Role | Product Designer |
|---|---|
| Company | Miroma group agency - Coconut |
| Focus | Fintech, self-employment, tax estimation, automated saving, open banking constraints, behavioural product design |
| Contribution | Product strategy, user research, product design |
| Team | 1 product designer, 3 engineers, 1 product manager |
| Year | 2022 |
| </aside> |
One of the biggest anxieties around self-employment is not just how much tax will be owed, but whether enough money has been set aside when the bill is due.
Coconut already gave customers a solid estimate of their expected tax liability. But estimating the amount was only half the problem. Customers had very different habits around actually saving toward that figure. Some were disciplined, some saved manually when they remembered, and others avoided the problem until the end of the tax year.
The opportunity was to move Coconut from a product that helped self-employed people understand tax, to one that actively helped them prepare for it.
The feature concept was an automated saving tool that could set money aside into a segregated account, helping users feel confident they were not accidentally spending money they would later owe to HMRC.
Tax anxiety is a core self-employment problem. It affects cash-flow confidence, trust in financial tools and a user's sense of control over their business.
For Coconut, this created a clear product opportunity. If the product could help customers move from tax awareness to tax readiness, it would become more valuable and harder to replace in the user's day-to-day financial workflow.
| Business risk | Product symptom | Design opportunity |
|---|---|---|
| Users understand their tax estimate but still fail to save | The product informs but does not fully change behaviour | Create a saving mechanism tied directly to the tax estimate |
| Users feel anxious about spending money they may owe later | Tax liability is psychologically mixed with available cash | Separate tax savings into a dedicated place that feels protected |
| Saving habits vary widely | One saving workflow may not fit every user's confidence level | Support both automatic and confirmation-based saving modes |
| The feature could become technically broad | External bank support would require third-party integrations | Start with Coconut current account customers to validate the core behaviour faster |
The strategic shift was to connect tax insight to action. The estimate created awareness; automated saving could create confidence.
The existing product could estimate tax, but customers still had to decide what to do with that information. That left a behavioural gap between knowing and acting.
A good saving-for-tax feature needed to solve several problems at once: help users trust the estimate, make saving feel safe, give users control over automation, and work within the limits of Coconut's banking infrastructure.
| Product tension | What made it difficult | Design response |
|---|---|---|
| Users wanted automation | Fully automated money movement can feel risky without trust | Explore modes that balance convenience and user control |
| Tax estimates can change | The amount to save is not a static target | Design around an ongoing tax estimate and visible progress |
| Users may use external accounts | Supporting external bank accounts would increase integration complexity | Start with Coconut current account customers to ship and learn faster |
| Money movement needs clarity | Users need to understand what has moved, why and where | Create transaction activity, deposits, withdrawals and automation settings |
| The feature had marketing value | A purely functional tool might feel dry or invisible | Name the automation element VaultAgent to give it a memorable identity |