FinTech — Consumer Financial Wellness — Case Study
Client
Debbie
Industry
FinTech — Consumer Financial Wellness
Team
Branding, Design, Product Development
The Challenge
Debbie's premise inverts how rewards have always worked. Credit card points reward spending; Debbie's founders, Frida Leibowitz and Rachel Lauren, met as college friends at NYU, where Frida graduated carrying $15,000 of her own credit card and student loan debt. That experience became the starting point for a different kind of rewards program, one that pays users real cash for paying down debt and building savings, the opposite of what most of the financial industry is set up to want.
Building that idea into a real product meant solving problems most fintech apps never have to touch. Debbie needed to link directly into users' actual debt and savings accounts, translate real financial progress into a points and rewards system people could trust, and layer in a psychology-based curriculum addressing why people get into debt in the first place, not just track that they're in it. And because Debbie is free to users and funded by credit union and bank sponsors rather than user fees, the product had to work for two audiences at once: everyday users trying to break a debt cycle, and financial institution partners funding the experience who need to see it actually change behavior.
Our Approach
We built Debbie's brand identity to feel like a supportive guide rather than a clinical budgeting tool, warm and encouraging in a category, personal debt, that's usually approached with shame or spreadsheets. The name and visual identity needed to work equally well presented directly to consumers and white-labeled inside a credit union's own member experience.
The core design challenge was making progress toward a hard financial goal feel motivating on a daily basis rather than distant and abstract. We designed the points, streaks, and milestone system around the small, frequent actions, an on-time payment, a savings deposit, a completed lesson, that actually build the habits behind lasting debt payoff, rather than only celebrating the distant end goal.
We built the underlying product connecting real financial accounts via Plaid to a points and rewards engine, alongside the behavioral psychology curriculum that helps users understand their own money mindset. The product needed to hold up as infrastructure for Debbie's bank and credit union partners, not just a consumer-facing app, since those partners sponsor the experience and needed to see measurable engagement and behavior change.
Technologies Used
The Result
Debbie has grown to serve more than 250,000 users and has raised more than $8 million to date, including a $5.3 million round that funded the launch of Rewards 2.0, tying points directly to every dollar of debt paid off and every dollar saved rather than to spending. Debbie has been named to CB Insights' Fintech 100, and its users have paid off debt at roughly three times the rate of the average borrower while saving an average of about $100 a month.
The branding and product foundation built in this engagement has scaled alongside Debbie's growth from an early-stage idea into infrastructure that credit unions and banks now sponsor directly, with the same points and rewards system extending to new partner institutions rather than requiring a rebuild for each one.
Active Users
Funds Raised
