Inspiration
Picture Sarah. She's 21, has $3,000 sitting in her Scotiabank chequing account, and just watched another TikTok telling her to "start investing early."
She opens the Scotia app. Sees TFSA, RRSP, FHSA, iTRADE. Closes it.
Two days later, she's on Wealthsimple.
This happens millions of times a year. We wanted to figure out why, and what Scotia could actually do about it. What we found surprised us. Scotia has every product Wealthsimple has. What it doesn't have is the moment where investing stops feeling scary.
What it does
Scodent is a confidence first investing experience built inside Scotiabank, designed for students.
Five questions. Plain English. Under two minutes.
Sarah tells us what she's saving for, how much she can realistically put in, how she feels about risk, and how hands on she wants to be. We map her answers to a real Scotia product she can open that day. An FHSA with Smart Investor, a TFSA, a GIC, whatever actually fits her life. Then we show her what $20 a week could look like in 10 years.
The whole thing is designed around one sentence: "Okay… I can actually do this."
That's the moment we're trying to manufacture.
How we built it
We started with the user, not the product. Sarah came first. Every screen got measured against whether it would help her stop freezing.
Research came from the case package, Reddit threads on r/CanadianInvestor, and competitor breakdowns of Wealthsimple and Questrade. We pulled real quotes from real users, not invented personas.
The prototype lives in Google Stitch. The recommendation logic is rules based and maps directly onto Scotia's existing infrastructure. Smart Investor for guidance seekers, iTRADE for the hands on, GICs for short horizons, registered accounts for everything else. No new tech stack required.
The pitch deck was built in Canva, structured like a product manager pitch rather than a school presentation.
Challenges we ran into
Naming. We burned hours on it. ScotiaSpark, ScotiaStart, every variation. Eventually we landed on Scodent because it sounded like it belonged to students, not to a 190 year old bank.
Scope. We kept wanting to add education modules, gamification, social proof, community features. We cut all of it. Every time we added something, we asked if it actually solved beginner paralysis or just looked cool. If it was the second one, it got cut.
Time. Twenty four hours isn't a lot. We prioritized the recommendation screen above everything else, because if that moment doesn't land, nothing else matters.
Two audiences. The product had to feel modern to students and credible to Scotia executives. Every design choice was a negotiation between those two.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We didn't build another robo advisor. We built a front door.
The MVP discipline is the thing we're most proud of. It would have been easier to add crypto, AI stock pickers, and social trading to look impressive. We didn't. Scotia already has iTRADE for advanced users. The unsolved moment is the first one, and Scodent only solves that.
We're also proud that the prototype feels real. The recommendation screen with FHSA plus Smart Investor and a 10 year projection is the moment we kept coming back to. It does the job in one screen.
And we built it as something Scotia could actually ship in 18 months. No fantasy infrastructure. No regulatory moonshot. Just a smarter front door to products that already exist.
What we learned
You can have the best products in the country and still lose. Wealthsimple isn't beating Scotia on products. It's beating Scotia on emotion.
Plain language is a feature, not a stylistic choice. "What are you investing for?" converts. "Select your investment objective" doesn't.
Cutting features is harder than adding them. Every removal felt like giving something up. But an MVP only earns its place if it does one thing well, and ours is unfreezing the first investment.
What's next for Scodent — Confidence-First Investing for Students
Phase 1 (0 to 6 months): Beta launch at five Canadian universities. Real students, real feedback.
Phase 2 (6 to 12 months): National rollout to all student banking customers.
Phase 3 (12 to 18 months): Expand to every Canadian aged 18 to 34.
The bigger play: $1 trillion is about to move from Boomers to younger Canadians. Whoever earns the investment relationship at 21 keeps it at 41. Scodent is how Scotia earns it.
Students don't need more investment products. They need confidence to begin.
Built With
- slides
- stitch
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