Sara Chong Designs | MoneySmart

About the Company

MoneySmart is one of Southeast Asia’s leading financial portals offering tools and resources to help customers make smart financial decisions. It provides comparisons of financial products like credit cards, loans and insurance, along with financial education.

My Roles

Head of Design (Group)

Jan 2022 - Present

Design Lead (Group)

Mar 2020 - Dec 2022

Senior Designer, Illustrator/Animator

Dec 2018 - Feb 2020

Illustrator & Content Designer

Nov 2016 - Nov 2018

Head of Design (Group)

Jan 2022 - Present

Led long-term design strategy for both product experience and marketing across Singapore and Hong Kong markets
Achieved 4.2x increase in signed-up customers and 2.6x increase in profiled users by leading the team in designing a large-scale personalized experience across the site.
Led a marketing design team that delivers 46 campaigns/mo, and 52 content briefs/mo.
Collaborated closely with other heads of departments and exco members to build and execute business strategy.
Managed and mentored the Design department which consisted of two product design teams of 3 designers each, and a marketing design team of 8.
Built a culture of close collaboration between the design department and other departments
Reworked design processes across the Product department to increase efficiency and clearer communications.
Created clear design career pathways in the Design department to support mentorship and growth.

CORE WORK

Transforming Product Experience

A personal finance product that needed to modernize to efficiently monetize.

As the world shifted into a cookie-less, high-privacy era, the cost of acquiring transactional customers without owning them proved to be unsustainable to the business. In order for the business to grow and succeed, we needed to start owning and retaining loyal customers on our platform.

We would offer users a highly personalized and rewarding experience on their personal finance journey in exchange for creating an account and sticking with us.

I led the design team on this large-scale experience redesign in collaboration with Product, Marketing and Commercial departments. This included a redesign of our existing information architecture, and introducing holistic design strategy across the MoneySmart ecosystem.

See Case Studies

4.2x

increase in account holders

2.6x

increase in profiled users

Design Lead (Group)

Mar 2020 - Dec 2021

Developed and led a full-scale brand refresh across Marketing and Product experience.
Created the Bubblegum brand in partnership with Group Head of Brand.
Ensured quality and operational efficiency of the brand and marketing design team, across two markets (Singapore and Hong Kong), including the timely delivery of 23 campaigns/month and 35 content briefs/mo within the team
Managing and mentoring a team of 4 designers
Developing cross-functional design service processes across Marketing and Commercial departments

CORE WORK

Brand Refresh

In 2020, we realized that brand evolution at scale was becoming a real problem. The team did not have a shared ethos or guiding principles to evolve and scale the brand, and relied on old, tried and tested templates.

The brand team conducted a series of market research initiatives and developed a new brand promise that matched what our customers actually cared about. Using this, I collaborated with the Head of Brand to develop a refresh of the brand, using the power of a simple narrative to align the organization.

One brand narrative to drive creativity and design: "Smart finances made easy for you."

Creating a brand design playbook that laddered up to the core brand narrative freed designers from thinking of the brand only in colours, motifs or rules. It helped them explore new visual and experience styles that related back to the brand narrative, maintaining consistency in expression.

See Full Case Study

Developing a new Visual Design Language

Senior Designer, Content Designer

Nov 2016 - Feb 2020

Started in 2016 as a Content Designer, grew my scope from infographic design to introduce animated videos to our content capability, which contributed to expanding our Media business offerings.
Art direction and content design for content and marketing departments
Timely delivery of creatives
Contributed to and evolved the MoneySmart brand experience.
Mentored and managed 1 designer from the marketing design team.

CORE WORK

Content Design

I started out at MoneySmart as a freelance Content Designer. My role was simply to create infographics for articles.

I introduced videos into the mix, and these expanded our media business offerings. With more sales came more work, and I trained an additional illustrator/animator to help me with our expanded scope of work.

This practice of training new designers carries on into our current team culture, where all new designers are taught motion design, regardless of previous experience.