Lessons from a Fintech Reinvention
Startups rarely move in straight lines. Jelli began with the dream of building a NeoBank and ended up reinventing what budgeting could look like for a generation raised on mobile games and AI. Their journey is proof that persistence matters more than perfect plans — and that pivots, when done right, can drive evolution.
The Digital Envelope Experiment
Some of the best ideas often start with a deceptively simple question: What if we could make something old work in a new way? For the founders of Jelli, that question led them back to a budgeting method that predates mobile apps, AI, and even debit cards: the cash envelope system.
“Our original concept was digital-envelope budgeting in the form of Jelli Jars, digital containers for segmenting your money,” recalls David, one of Jelli’s co-founders. The idea was both elegant and familiar. Instead of stuffing envelopes with cash to control spending, users would allocate funds into digital jars: visual, trackable, and powered by a banking backbone.
It was a digital translation of a system that had worked for decades. When an envelope was empty, you couldn’t spend more unless you pulled from another category. Jelli’s founders saw an opportunity to make that discipline effortless, automated, and scalable for the digital age.
To work, Jelli needed to operate as a full-fledged NeoBank — a place where money could be deposited, stored, and transacted through JelliJARS. It was an ambitious leap for a startup trying to win the trust of consumers in one of the most sensitive industries imaginable: personal finance.
And almost immediately, reality pushed back.
“The primary hurdle we encountered with the original Jelli NeoBank was that people did not want to change bank accounts,” says David. Even when early adopters signed up, they tended to keep their primary checking account elsewhere.
For a team betting on behavioral change, that resistance was a wake-up call. The problem wasn’t whether people liked the concept — they did. The problem was whether they were willing to rewire one of the most entrenched parts of their financial lives. And as Jelli’s founders quickly discovered, that’s no small ask.
Signals From the Market
For Jelli’s founders, the decision to pivot wasn’t born from a lightning-bolt revelation. It was, as Jelli’s founders describe, more of a slow accumulation of signals.
“There wasn’t a single aha moment. In hindsight, there was, but it took some time to take root in our minds,” they say. The team believed deeply in their NeoBank model — and, in theory, they were convinced it would have worked if they had the capital to offer more services than a traditional bank. But the reality of fundraising began to chip away at that conviction.
In 2024, the dominance of AI narratives (and the revelation that acquiring a new banking customer could cost up to $1,000) made it clear that Jelli’s NeoBank model was misaligned with investor realities. As David recalls, that was the moment he knew the product had to pivot toward putting AI at the core.
From Letting Go to Moving Forward
Letting go of an original vision is rarely easy for founders. In Jelli’s case, the pivot unfolded as an upgrade.
“Our original goal with Jelli was simple and effective budgeting. Our new version of Jelli accomplished this even more,” David explains. By plugging into a user’s existing bank account, the product could automatically analyze spending history, generate a personalized budget, and even set up the first JelliJARS without requiring hours of manual input.
It was a leap from helping users enforce discipline to helping users discover discipline automatically. AI became the enabler of this shift. Much like ChatGPT can synthesize vast amounts of online data into answers, Jelli’s AI-powered budgeting assistant, JJ, could scan transaction history to answer financial questions in real time.
“This greatly simplifies setting up your budget. And utilizing the power of AI in your personal bank account gives you endless and instant answers to any questions that you have,” Tom says.
For many founders, pivots are haunted by the specter of failure. Changing course can feel like admitting defeat. But Jelli’s leadership framed it differently.
“We began to see cracks in the path we were on and, over time, knew we had to change directions ,” David recalls. Instead of clinging to the original NeoBank model, they interrogated it until the cracks were undeniable.
What they found on the other side was energy. “When you move towards the right path, it is actually invigorating and inspiring. It’s hard to find that in clinging to the wrong path. True fear actually comes from staying on the crumbling path or clinging to an idea that is no longer valid.”
Meeting a Generation on Its Own Terms
When fintech founders talk about customer segmentation, they often underestimate how sharply generational preferences shape adoption. For Jelli, focusing on Gen-Z was a recognition that this cohort demanded a radically different user experience.
“Traditional budgeting apps are difficult to set up and maintain and they are tedious and boring. Gen Z wants speed, simplicity, and automation,” says Ben. They’re also the first mobile-native generation, conditioned to expect experiences that are fluid, playful, and personalized. As he puts it, “They love to play games on their phone, gamifying budgeting is the icing on the cake.”
The broader lesson: if you want to serve Gen-Z, you can’t simply repackage existing solutions. You have to design for the way they already interact with digital tools.
Beyond Stereotypes
One of the easiest traps founders fall into is reducing Gen-Z to clichés. The assumption often goes: because this generation budgets less, they must not care about money management. But that’s a misread of the problem.
“The biggest misconception with Gen Z is to assume they don’t want to budget their money because they don’t budget their money,” Tom explains. “I believe that is because there isn’t a way to budget that speaks to them.”
In other words, behavior doesn’t always equal intent. Gen-Z may be disengaged from traditional financial tools not because they reject budgeting, but because those tools feel alien. They don’t consume news the way their parents once did — so why expect them to use financial products designed for a previous generation?
For founders, this underscores an important point: adoption gaps often signal design mismatches, not lack of demand. If you see an entire generation underusing a product category, it may be less about disinterest and more about unmet UX expectations. If you’re designing for Gen-Z, ask yourself: Does this product match their digital behaviors? Am I assuming disinterest where there might be unmet demand? Am I relying on stereotypes instead of data?
Getting this wrong risks alienating the largest emerging consumer base in fintech. Getting it right means creating tools that feel less like chores and more like experiences they already enjoy.
Redefining What a Budgeting Tool Can Be
Founders often struggle with the tension between building something familiar enough to be trusted and different enough to stand out. In personal finance, that tension is amplified because money is both highly personal and highly sensitive.
Jelli’s current product bets on a different design language than traditional budgeting apps: instead of spreadsheets, rules, and dashboards, it leans on automation, gamification, and conversational AI.
“Jelli uses AI features to quickly give you a base budget. It automates the tedious tasks of budgeting while giving the user full control to make adjustments,” founders explain.
But the real twist lies in the presentation. Through gamified mechanics, the app borrows cues from mobile gaming rather than financial software. At the core sits JJ, a conversational assistant designed to make interacting with your spending as simple as asking a question — a shift made possible with the support of INSART, which helped the team translate this vision into a working product.
For other founders, the insight here is less about copying gamification and more about asking: what adjacent industries can inspire a reframe of your product experience? Finance doesn’t have to look like finance. Sometimes the best UX inspiration comes from entertainment, gaming, or social apps — the places your target users already spend their time.
A natural question follows: how do you keep financial tools credible while borrowing aesthetics from games and social platforms? For Jelli, the answer was cultural alignment with Gen-Z rather than cautious half-steps.
“With the initial Jelli, we pushed this line cautiously. With the new Jelli, we threw caution to the wind,” Ben says. Instead of asking young users to adapt to finance’s existing visual language, the team flipped the script: we’re going to them, not asking them to come to us.
Expanding Beyond Budgeting
For many fintech startups, the hardest part is knowing when to stop. Feature creep can kill focus. But when expansion is deliberate and aligned with user needs, it can also define the next phase of growth.
Jelli’s team views budgeting not as the end, but as the starting point for a broader financial journey. “Budgeting is the beginning. Saving and investing are the next objectives,” Ben says. The idea is to bring the same principles — automation, gamification, and simplicity — into adjacent financial behaviors where Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha are still underserved.
So, don’t expand because you can — expand because your users need you to.
The Future of Gen-Z and Money
A second forward-looking lesson is how to anticipate your market’s evolution. Gen-Z’s financial journey is still unfolding, but Jelli’s founders believe their potential is enormous if the industry rises to meet them.
“If the industry serves them properly, we see their relationship with money evolving to a great place,” they note. With the right tools, this generation can gain enough control over their finances to free them for what they value most: careers, skills, and passions that align with identity.
The insight here is less about predicting the future and more about shaping it. For fintech founders, the challenge is not just to react to user behaviors but to design tools that elevate them into healthier patterns.
Lessons From the Journey
Ask any founder what they’ve learned, and the answer is usually less about tactics than about resilience. For Jelli’s team, the thread that runs through everything is persistence.
“Nothing goes as planned but you need a plan to get there,” the founders reflect. They compare it to climbing a mountain: the trail twists, obstacles force detours, and sometimes you stumble in the dark. But without walking the original path, you’d never discover the better one.
For entrepreneurs, the often-overlooked truth is that persistence matters more than the plan. Strategy may shift, pivots may come, but progress only happens if you keep moving forward.
“Be open to change. Listen to your customers. Anticipate the future. It’s like shooting a moving target — you have to aim in front to hit it or you’ll miss.”
Staying Motivated
“When you create something that you really believe in, it’s impossible to set it down,” David says. Even as Jelli has gone through refinements and course corrections, the core motivation has stayed the same: building a product that solves a real problem in a way the market hasn’t seen before.
Markets shift, products evolve, but conviction in the mission is what allows you to keep adjusting without burning out. In the end, it’s that belief (not funding rounds or feature lists) that gives founders the stamina to outlast uncertainty and turn pivots into progress.
