The Brief
Wise asked designers to find a way to get parents and guardians of 15 to 17 year olds to set up Young Explorer for their kids. The product already existed. The challenge was persuasion. How do you make a financial product feel like the obvious choice for a teen's first big trip, when you can't market directly to the teen themselves?
The brief had a longer game in mind. Wise's research shows 39% of adults still bank with the provider their parent set them up with. Getting a teenager onto Wise wasn't just about the trip. It was about building a relationship that would convert into a full account at 18.
What Research Revealed
I started by mapping where Wise sat relative to competitors like GoHenry and Starling Kite. Most of what existed in that space was built around parental control. Pocket money, spending locks, allowance tools. GoHenry had a meaningful head start on financial education, with gamified Money Missions, badges, and savings goals baked into the product. Starling Kite kept things simpler but covered the same oversight ground. Neither framed their tools around the moment parents actually care about most. Letting their kid go somewhere with a feeling of independence for the first time.
That gap pointed to where Wise could do something different. Rather than competing on education or everyday controls, the stronger move was to design around travel. The emotionally loaded moment where parents most need reassurance and teens most want freedom. Wise's multicurrency infrastructure made it uniquely placed to own that moment in a way GoHenry and Starling Kite simply couldn't.
Early Direction
My first instinct was a savings goal feature aimed at teens. A teenager could name a goal, like a Tokyo Trip, Interrailing, or Glastonbury, set a target in any currency, and watch their pounds (£) convert to yen (¥) or euros (€) in real time as they saved toward it.
It was a compelling concept, but the problems became clearer the longer I worked on it. It was aimed at the teen, not the parent. The brief required a solution that spoke to parents and guardians. It also leaned on features competitors already offered. And it didn't address the core emotional moment. Not the buildup to the trip, but the trip itself.
I scrapped it and reframed the problem. The tension wasn't about saving. It was about the moment a parent hands their kid a card and says they're on their own.
Design Process
That reframe led to Travel Ready, a guided setup for parents built into the existing Young Explorer card area of the Wise app.
The concept works as a guided flow. A parent taps "Prepare a trip," enters the destination, travel dates, and who the child is travelling with. Wise generates a suggested Travel Ready plan with currencies to load, a daily spending limit, ATM withdrawal settings, and merchant category controls. The parent reviews it, edits anything they want to change, and activates it.
From there the card runs in Travel Ready mode. The parent gets live spend notifications, limit alerts, and a tap to top up if their child runs low. When the trip ends, Wise shows a short recap of where the money went, how it was handled, and a prompt to keep the account active for future use.
Structuring the flow this way kept control with the parent while giving the teen genuine independence in the moment. The parent doesn't need to be involved once the trip starts unless they want to be.
Choices and Trade-offs
The main tension was how much to show the teen versus the parent. An early version gave the teen a detailed mirror view of the Travel Ready plan inside their own app. I pulled this back. Showing a teen the exact limits their parent had set risked making the product feel restrictive rather than freeing. A lighter, friendlier trip view worked better, enough to make them feel included without turning the plan into a visible cage.
The recap needed the most thought. It had to avoid feeling like a report card. The goal was to end the experience on something rewarding rather than evaluative, something that made both parent and teen want to do it again.
Reflection
Travel Ready works within Wise's existing product and design system rather than proposing anything new from scratch. That constraint was intentional and the right call. The brief wasn't asking for a new product. It was asking for something that made the product already in front of parents feel necessary.
What I didn't get to explore was how this experience could extend beyond travel into everyday teen spending. The recap hints at it, but the fuller version of this idea would shift the relationship from built around travel to habitual, so that by 18, moving to a full Wise account isn't a decision. It's just the next obvious step.
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” — Peter Drucker
© 2026 Benjamin Segall