US fintech app0 → 1 pitch

ID Protection

Every major competitor sold identity protection and we did not. I researched the gap and pitched a product to the founder: the business model, the full UX and a dispute flow.

The ID Protection product pitch: onboarding, introduction, dashboard and monitoring screens.
Role
Product Designer: research lead, UX, business model, pitch deck
Timeline
4.5 months
Tools
FigmaGoogle AI Studio
Status
Pitched to the founder. Not shipped.Closed · May 2026
4.5 moResearch to pitch
5+Competitors mapped
0 → 1Product, end to end
1In-app dispute flow

Overview

A product pitch built from data we already held.

Problem

Every major competitor sold identity protection. We were an app built to improve users' credit, and we had no monitoring surface.

My part

I led the research, built the business model and pricing logic, and designed the full UX including a dispute flow. I prototyped it in Google AI Studio.

Result

Pitched to the founder. It did not move forward. The research, the business model and the UX are ready if it returns to the roadmap.

Context

Competitors all had it. We had the data and no product.

In US fintech, ID Protection is a standard category: credit monitoring, breach alerts, identity theft detection, dispute tools. The premise is that your financial identity is exposed in more places than you track, and a financial app is the right place to surface when something changes.

We didn't have it. For an app built around improving users' credit and financial health, that was a visible gap.

I started with a different question: what are we missing? I mapped Acorns, Chime, MoneyLion, Kikoff, Aura and others, found what most of them shared, and filtered it against our user base, our business model and the infrastructure we already had.

AuraFull ID monitoring, breach alerts, fraud resolution, credit lock. Standalone subscription product.
MoneyLionCredit monitoring, identity alerts, dark web scan. Bundled into the premium membership tier.
KikoffCredit monitoring, identity protection, dispute assistance. Tied to its credit-building product.
ChimeTransaction alerts, security freeze, early breach notification through partner integrations.
AcornsIdentity protection as a premium add-on through an Experian partnership.
UsNot present.Credit data exists. No monitoring surface.

ID Protection was the strongest gap. It was a competitor staple, and the user profile fit: people rebuilding credit with thin files, financially vulnerable in ways that make identity monitoring useful.

Competitor research: a credit bureau's Dispute Center, a dispute explainer with three steps, and a Protect your account monitoring pitch with 24/7 monitoring.

Competitor research: how others handle disputes and identity monitoring.

Approach

I pitched a product, and built it from what already existed.

Three things set the brief I gave myself. Each one led to a decision.

01Credit bureau connections and credit data already existed for users.Build a product surface on that data, with no new data layer and no greenfield build.
02A feature request would not answer whether we should charge for this, or whether it fit us.Pitch the product, the pricing logic and the UX together, so one case answers both questions.
03Credit report errors suppress users' scores, and score improvement is our core value proposition.Put a dispute flow inside the app, so monitoring leads to the outcome users already pay us for.

Solution

The pitch covered the product, the price and every screen.

I built the business model logic and pricing structure, and what monetization looks like. Alongside that I designed the complete UX: onboarding, the introduction story, the dashboard and every state in it, edge cases, UX copy for every screen, and marketing copy tight enough to introduce the product externally.

Three phones showing the Credit Protection dashboard scrolled down: the Irregular Activity card and Disputes Center, then AI insights and Ask Anything, then Offers Unlocked.

The Credit Protection dashboard, top to bottom.

The introduction story in four screens: AI Credit Protection with 1 in 4 people face credit identity scams, then three slides on scammers, disputing issues early with Bright AI, and better loan offers with a strong credit profile.

Introduction story: the risk, the dispute, and the loan offers it protects.

How the screens were reasoned.

PitchWe saw in competitors that fomo and scarcity was the core.
UXWe wanted to use chunking to segregate actionable insights from the user's credit report.
DashboardWe wanted to design a dashboard that can show what we already have but break it down into individual flows. Colors and copy signify how their current credit activity looks, with clear actions to be taken. A widget lets users track their disputes, and another is an entry point to Bright's AI.
The ID Protection pitch screen, Your information might be used by someone else, beside the Activity Center with an unknown hard credit inquiry alert and the user's credit report.

The pitch screen, and the Activity Center that chunks the credit report into actions.

The dashboard in two phones with notes: colors and copy that show current credit activity with clear actions, a widget to track disputes, and a widget that is an entry point to Bright's AI.

Dashboard, annotated.

Dashboard explorations: three versions of the Credit Protection screen, with a Check for Irregularities card, a Protection Score of Good, and a Current Protection score of 80%.

Dashboard explorations.

The dashboard in the middle, flanked by the Core Activity and Offers For You components, a Report Rent, Report Cell and Utility Bills and Bright Builder offers card, and the unique loader.

The dashboard and its components: core activity, offers, and the loader.

Dispute flow

The dispute flow carried the case.

Users can have errors on their credit report, and those errors suppress their score. A path to dispute them from inside the app directly helps the score improve.

That makes the dispute flow a direct extension of what the product already exists to do, not a feature add. It gives users a reason to stay in the app and engage with monitoring over time, and it ties the monetization back to the outcome users already pay us to deliver.

The credit dispute flow: How Credit Disputes Work, the Dispute Center with Resolved, In Dispute and Drafts tabs, and a Review before submitting screen for a credit card dispute.

Credit dispute flow: how disputes work, the Dispute Center, and review before submitting.

Outcome

The pitch reached the founder and stopped there.

The product didn't move forward.

"You've built a product from the ground up, this is a big deal." Design director, on end-to-end delivery

That outcome doesn't undo the work. The research mapped a real gap, the business model logic held, and the UX showed the product was buildable on existing infrastructure. If ID Protection returns to the roadmap, the foundation is there.

A pitch that doesn't ship still informed a real product decision.

Takeaways

What I would do differently.

  1. Narrow the comparison set earlier. Not all competitors were the right analogue for our user profile. Tighter scope would have sharpened the business case faster.
  2. Give the dispute flow more room in the pitch. It ties directly to credit score improvement, our core outcome, so it belonged at the front and not as a supporting detail. That argument makes the product feel native to us, not borrowed from a competitor's feature list.
  3. Prototype earlier. The Google AI Studio prototype was the right call: stakeholders saw the product before they were asked to approve it. I would do that sooner on every 0→1 project.