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  SmartStart Toggle On

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  SmartStart Toggle Off

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  SmartStart Quick Tips

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  SmartStart Explanation

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  SmartStart Off

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  Improved Scotia iTrade placement

The GPS Strategy — Making Scotiabank a Match for Young Investors

Inspiration

Everyone around us was talking about Wealthsimple. Friends, classmates, people online — they all seemed to land there automatically when they started investing. And we kept wondering: why not Scotiabank? Most of them already banked there. The app was already on their phone. The trust was already there. It just wasn't being used. That disconnect is what drove us to build the GPS Strategy.

What It Does

The GPS Strategy is a three-part framework to make Scotiabank a match for young investors by closing three critical gaps — education, friction, and visibility:

$$\text{GPS} = \text{Growth-Oriented Education} + \text{Process to Portfolio} + \text{Strategic Visibility}$$

Growth-Oriented Education reaches young Canadians through micro-influencers and marketing reform. SmartStart is an Easy Mode built directly into Scotia iTRADE that strips away financial jargon and simplifies the investing experience for beginners. Strategic Visibility improves how iTRADE is surfaced inside the existing Scotiabank app, turning a buried menu item into an obvious next step.

How We Built It

We started with the problem, not the solution. That meant researching how young Canadians actually make investing decisions, benchmarking Scotiabank against Wealthsimple and Questrade, and identifying exactly where iTRADE was losing people. From there we built the three pillars of GPS and brought SmartStart to life in Figma — prototyping the interface, mapping user flows, and designing every screen to reflect what a first-time investor actually needs. We used Make to automate parts of our workflow, keeping the process lean and focused.

Challenges We Ran Into

Designing SmartStart in Figma was the hardest part. It's easy to say "make it simpler" — it's much harder to decide what that actually looks like on a screen. How do you strip away complexity without stripping away functionality? Every tooltip, toggle, and screen placement was a deliberate decision about what a first-time investor needs versus what overwhelms them. We framed the core design tension as:

$$\text{Accessibility} \uparrow \quad \Rightarrow \quad \text{Complexity} \downarrow \quad \text{without} \quad \text{Functionality} \downarrow$$

Making the case for Scotiabank in a landscape dominated by fintech competitors was its own challenge too.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

We're proud that the GPS Strategy doesn't ask Scotiabank to rebuild from scratch. Every recommendation builds on infrastructure that already exists — the app, the brand, the customer base. We're also proud of the SmartStart prototype we built in Figma: a toggleable Easy Mode that makes iTRADE accessible to beginners without taking anything away from experienced investors. In short:

$$\text{New Users} + \text{Existing Infrastructure} = \text{Compounding Growth}$$

What We Learned

Scotiabank doesn't have a product problem — it has a messenger problem and a visibility problem. The tools exist. The customers exist. The trust exists. The biggest lesson was that the most untapped market Scotiabank has is already inside its own app. We came to think of it as:

$$\text{Untapped Potential} = \text{Existing Customers} - \text{Awareness} - \text{Friction}$$

Sometimes the most powerful strategy isn't building something new — it's finally connecting the dots between what you already have.

What's Next for The GPS Strategy

The immediate next step is SmartStart — a phased rollout of the Easy Mode toggle within Scotia iTRADE, starting with plain-language tooltips and beginner-friendly navigation. From there, the micro-influencer campaign brings the message to where young investors actually spend their time. Long term, the GPS Strategy lays the groundwork for Scotiabank to become the default investing platform for the next generation of Canadian investors — not by out-spending the competition, but by out-connecting them.

$$\text{Right Platform} + \text{Right Message} + \text{Right Audience} = \text{The GPS Strategy}$$

Built With

• figma