Charlie

Personal Finance One Text at a Time

Our Expertise
“After the 6-week program ended, the frog withdrawal is real. The team and I truly enjoyed our work together. It energized us big time. We thought we hired frog to create a new brand, but in the end, they had given our entire company a transformation!"
Ilian Georgiev, CEO, Charlie
frog partnered with Charlie, a seed-funded startup on a mission to transform how Americans manage their daily spending and saving habits. Charlie is a financial assistant that emotionally connects with its users, using AI, machine learning and natural language processing. Charlie makes it easy and delightful for users to save and spend smarter.
From Personal Finance to Personal Victory
Charlie is a smarter financial solution that builds an emotional connection through its more natural interface and its unique ability to adapt to the contexts of people’s lives. Functioning much like a personal CFO in your pocket, Charlie constantly monitors your transactions and nudges you via text to make smarter financial decisions.
Creating an App for the Emotional Side of Saving
frog created a visually distinct, emotional manifestation of the Charlie product– the prodigy penguin. A key design challenge was to create a character able to show emotional expression, personalization and empathy through Facebook messenger and SMS. The result is a character who can respond to users’ most sensitive financial questions in a friendly, conversational way.
Building Conversational UI
For Charlie, traditional ‘if this then that’ flow charts did not suffice, so the team worked instead from sentiment analysis and natural language processing. frog created a ‘relationship model framework’ that defines how Charlie and users learn from each other, as well as a character bible that prescribes to the developer team what phrases Charlie should say and when.
A Collaboration Model Optimized for Start-ups
As a frogVentures portfolio company, Charlie had access to frog’s comprehensive capabilities and experience in the finance sector. frog developed a bespoke collaboration model, which included co-working sessions for key stakeholders, and weekly and bi-weekly sprints that reflected the efficiency and agility of the frogVentures approach.
6 Weeks
The six-week engagement included quantitative and qualitative user research methods to test concepts and messaging for resonance with target customers.
January 2018
Charlie launches to the public, ready to start chatting via text or messenger.
$9 Million
In November 2018, Charlie secures $9M in Series A funding led by BBVA's Propel Venture Partners.
After launching in early 2018, Charlie is analyzing close to $5 billion of transactions, and helping pay down over $50 million in debt. frog will continue to support Charlie’s efforts in reaching their goal of one million users over the next five years.
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