04 · Spatial UX · Banking · Concept

Metaverse Banking — bringing the first metaverse banking UX to life.

Reimagining retail banking as a spatial experience: a calm café world where your portfolio, goals and research float around you as arrangeable panels — not another dashboard behind another login.

metaverse.bank / home

Metaverse banking home — welcome dashboard with goals, portfolio, sectors and indices floating in a café scene

Hotspot 1 · Goals rail

Left-hand rail keeps long-term goals — retirement, home, education — at eye level, so every trade is measured against them.

A concept case study exploring how retail banking and wealth management could feel inside a spatial, immersive metaverse — a calm café instead of a cold trading terminal. The project reimagines portfolio review, goal-based investing, sector research and stock analysis as floating, glanceable panels the customer can arrange around them.

Role

Lead UX — Concept & spatial design

Team

Solo concept · Design exploration

Timeline

6 weeks

Medium

VR / Spatial · Figma · Prototype

Context

Banking has stayed the same while the world moved on.

Every online bank looks the same — a grid of cards, a sidebar of products, an aggressive push to cross-sell. Meanwhile, the tools people use for everything else — communication, entertainment, work — have become spatial, ambient and personal.

I took inspiration from the UX Collective banking case study and asked a simple question: if the customer stepped into their bank tomorrow, what would we want them to feel? Not overwhelmed. Not sold to. Just informed, in control, and calm.

Problem

Three friction points break the customer's mental model.

Information overload, zero context

Traditional banking UIs treat every number equally — balances, tickers, alerts and ads compete for the same real estate. Users can't tell what needs attention.

Goals disconnected from actions

Long-term goals — retirement, a home, a child's education — live in one product. Trades and portfolio changes live in another. Users can't see how today's action moves tomorrow's goal.

Research is a tab-switching graveyard

Reading a market article, checking a stock, comparing peers and looking up fundamentals means jumping across five surfaces. By the time you're done, the insight is gone.

Approach

Design principles for a spatial bank.

Rather than porting a 2D dashboard into VR, I designed each screen as a room the customer inhabits — and used the depth, angle and softness of the space to guide attention.

Principle 01

Ambient, not aggressive

A soft, blurred café backdrop replaces the harsh chrome of a trading terminal. The bank becomes a place, not a product.

Principle 02

Panels, not pages

Every module — portfolio, goals, sectors, fear-and-greed, news — is a floating, angled panel the user can glance at or dismiss.

Principle 03

One gesture, one intent

Scan a real-world article. Drag a stock into a basket. Slide a slider to answer a question. Each interaction maps to a single mental action.

Design solution

A calm room where money makes sense.

The home scene arranges the customer's financial life as five soft panels: Goals and Sectors to the left, Portfolio front-and-centre, and Fear & Greed, Currencies and Commodities to the right.

Movers — Gainers, Losers, Top Trades, Alerts — sit below the fold as a quiet ticker rather than a shouting banner.

Home scene — spatial arrangement of goals, portfolio, sectors and indices — Home scene — panels are angled toward the viewer, softened by depth-of-field.

Scan a physical article to pull it into the bank — Read something in the real world? Scan it. The article becomes a panel inside the bank, linked to the assets it moves.

Article panel appears next to Market Environment with inflation and rate of return — Once scanned, the article docks next to Market Environment — inflation and rate-of-return get the same visual weight as the news that's moving them.

Deep dive

Retirement goal → analyse → optimise.

The most consequential flow in retail investing is the goal check. I designed it as a seven-step spatial journey.

Step 01

See the goal, not just the number

Retirement Goal shows corpus, target age, and an honest 'not met' badge — no green vanity metrics.

Step 02

Drill into any holding

Tap a stock and the room reconfigures: chart, news, fundamentals, and a plain-English recommendation.

Step 03

Understand a whole sector at once

Compare the largest holdings in Healthcare / Tech / Financials against related news — without leaving the room.

Step 04

Analyse before you optimise

Ten short, human questions on a slider — spending, runway, risk appetite. No forms, no jargon.

Step 05

Drag stocks into an optimisation basket

Holdings drop into a basket that fills toward 100% — a tangible progress bar for an invisible decision.

Step 06

Fill the basket, see the trade-offs

The basket previews the sector mix as stocks are added. Rebalance by dragging back — muscle memory, not spreadsheets.

Step 07

Get an honest recommendation

At 100%, the system labels the basket — 'Recommended However Risky' — and shows the pruned list. Transparent, not marketing-safe.

Reflection

What a spatial bank taught me.

The medium changes the message. The moment you stop treating a bank as a page and start treating it as a room, you stop asking “what fits on the screen?” and start asking “what does the customer need to see at eye level?”

The result is fewer modules, more silence between them, and a product that feels less like a tool and more like a place — which is what a bank was always supposed to be.