Ledger: a bank dashboard that answers the question people actually ask

The problem

The support team logged every call for a month. The single biggest category — 31% — was some version of “why is my balance lower than I expected?”. The dashboard had all the data to answer that. It just didn't say it.

Interviews with twelve customers confirmed the pattern: people don't want a list of transactions, they want a story. What came in, what went out, what's unusual.

What we did

The new overview leads with a sentence, not a number: “You spent £412 more than usual this month, mostly on travel.” Below it, the three things that explain the difference. The full list is still there, one tap down — but almost nobody needs it now.

The hard part wasn't the layout. It was deciding what counts as “unusual” for someone whose income arrives on random days. We shipped a version, watched it be wrong for two weeks, and fixed the model with the data team.

“The first month after launch was the first month in three years that ‘balance questions’ wasn't our top category.” Head of customer support

Outcome

Support calls about balances down 34% over the following quarter. App-store rating from 3.6 to 4.4. And a design principle the bank kept: lead with the sentence, then the number.