Scotia Simple

Scotiabank already sees your money. We built the feature that puts it to work.

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Inspiration

We started with a stat that kind of bothered us. 61% of young Canadians say they cannot invest because they do not have money. But when you actually look at the data, 43% of them just do not know where to begin. That is not a money problem. That is a clarity problem.

We all have friends who bank with Scotiabank, have a few hundred dollars sitting in chequing doing nothing, and also have a Wealthsimple account they opened once and forgot about. The money is there. Nobody is showing them it is there. Nobody is making it easy to act on it at the right moment.

That is what we wanted to fix. Scotiabank already has a relationship with millions of young Canadians. It already sees their paycheques, their subscriptions, their spending patterns. No fintech has that. Wealthsimple does not know when your gym membership cancels. Scotiabank does. We just wanted to make that data actually do something useful for the person it belongs to.

What it does

Scotia Simple is a feature built directly into the Scotiabank app. It has two core ideas and a full investing path built on top of them.

The first is Money Moments. The app watches your real transaction data and detects when you have surplus cash you probably did not notice. Maybe you spent $80 less on dining this month. Maybe a subscription cancelled. When that happens, the app surfaces a simple card right on your home screen. It says something like "you spent $80 less on dining this month, want to move $25 into your TFSA?" You tap confirm. The money moves. That is it. No research required, no deciding when or how much, no opening a separate app.

The second is the Living Risk Profile. Every other investing platform asks you five questions when you sign up and never revisits your risk tolerance again. Scotia Simple watches how you actually behave with money over time. When your income goes up, your spending stabilizes, or a major expense disappears, the app notices and tells you your profile may be ready to grow. Wealthsimple still thinks you are whoever you were on the day you signed up. Scotia Simple knows who you are today.

We also built a full Smart Trading experience inside the app. It has real stock search, charts across multiple timeframes, buy and sell order flows with market and limit order types, a portfolio tab, a trade history log, and balance validation so you cannot buy more than you actually have. The reason this matters is not just that it is a cool feature. The case makes clear that Scotiabank is losing young Canadians to Wealthsimple Trade and similar platforms when they decide they want to pick their own stocks. Right now there is no path inside Scotiabank that takes someone from their first $25 TFSA contribution to buying their first stock without leaving the app or opening a completely separate brokerage account. Scotia Simple creates that path. A user who starts with a Money Moment, grows their managed portfolio through the Living Risk Profile, and eventually wants more can trade right there. And when they are ready for the full experience, Scotiabank already has iTRADE with commission free ETF trading and a complete brokerage platform. The path from first investment to self directed trading now exists entirely within Scotiabank. Before this, it did not.

The one tap sweep only works because the chequing account and the TFSA live inside the same institution. That is not a coincidence. That is the whole argument. Every Money Moment is a reason to keep your investment accounts at Scotiabank because the moment you move to Wealthsimple, the engine that was finding money for you stops working.

How we built it

We built the full prototype as a React and Vite web app styled to match the Scotiabank mobile app as closely as possible. We used Tailwind CSS for styling with custom Scotiabank colour tokens, Framer Motion for all the animations including the confirmation checkmark, the confetti, and the animated balance updates, Recharts for the TFSA portfolio chart, and Lucide icons throughout.

The app has no backend and no authentication. Everything runs on client state through a React context. All the banking data is mocked and lives in one file. The state updates when you confirm a Money Moment so every number on every screen reflects the action you just took in real time.

We built six main screens plus the trading mini app: a lock screen notification, a splash screen, the home dashboard, the Money Moment detail and confirmation flow, the Moments History timeline, the Living Risk Profile screen, and the Smart Trading experience with eight stocks, real chart generation per stock and timeframe, buy and sell modals, a watchlist, search, portfolio tab, and a full trade history log. Trades update chequing and TFSA balances in real time and validate against what you actually have before letting you proceed.

We also built the TFSA onboarding flow from scratch because we wanted to handle the case where the user does not yet have a TFSA. The first Money Moment becomes the account opening moment. The surplus we detected is the reason they open the account today instead of never.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the state to update consistently across every screen after a Money Moment confirmation was harder than we expected. When you tap confirm, the chequing balance, the TFSA balance, the net worth banner, the history item status, and the yearly total all need to change at the same time. Getting those to stay in sync without everything breaking took a few iterations.

The Smart Trading balance validation also took real work. Making sure a buy order correctly checks the selected funding account, blocks the transaction if funds are insufficient, updates that account balance after the trade, and logs the trade with the right account, price, quantity, and timestamp required careful state management across a lot of moving pieces.

We also had to make hard decisions about what to cut from the demo. We built more than we could show in 90 seconds and deciding which screens to walk through and which to keep as backup took real conversation as a team.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The thing we are most proud of is that the product actually works end to end. You can open the app, see a Money Moment, confirm it, watch the balances update in real time, check your history, see your risk profile update based on your financial behaviour, and then go buy a stock. The whole flow holds together and the numbers stay consistent throughout. That took a lot of debugging and we are glad it is solid going into the presentation.

The confirmation screen is also something we are happy with. The net worth staying the same when the balances update is a detail we were deliberate about. The money moved but nothing disappeared. We added a line that says your total wealth did not change, it just went to work. That one detail makes the product feel honest rather than gimmicky.

What we learned

We learned that the hardest part of a case comp is not the product, it is knowing what to leave out. We built more than we could present and had to cut screens that took real time to build. That was frustrating but it made the demo cleaner.

We also learned that the regulatory question is the first thing a serious judge asks. The line between surfacing data observations and giving financial advice is something we had to understand well enough to explain in 30 seconds under pressure. It is not a detail you can hand wave.

What's next for Scotia One

If this were a real product the next steps would be a pilot with a small segment of Scotiabank's existing 18 to 34 chequing customers who do not have an active Smart Investor account. The acquisition cost for that segment is near zero because they are already in the app every day. Even a 10% conversion at an average balance of $3,000 is hundreds of millions in new AUM without any paid marketing.

The Living Risk Profile is also only scratching the surface. Right now it fires once when three signals line up. In a real build it would be a continuous model updating every month and the portfolio recommendations would shift gradually rather than showing one alert.

The Smart Trading experience would connect directly to Scotia iTRADE in a real implementation. The in app trading gives users a taste of self directed investing and iTRADE gives them the full thing when they are ready. The goal is that no one ever has a reason to open Wealthsimple Trade because everything they want from it already exists inside Scotiabank.

The bigger play is the intergenerational wealth transfer the case describes. $1 trillion moving from Baby Boomers to younger Canadians between 2023 and 2026. The institutions that already have investment relationships with younger Canadians will capture that capital. The institutions that do not will not. Scotia Simple is how Scotiabank builds those relationships now, cheaply, at scale, using data it already owns.

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