Case Study · Fintech
Start saving, start winning
A prize-linked savings app that turns every saved dollar into a shot at winning.
Grand is one of America's pioneering apps that makes saving money gratifying. Silicon Prime overhauled the product — rebuilding the back-end and simplifying the experience while keeping every dollar secure.
3,000+
Monthly active users
4.4★
App Store rating
3
Member core team
The Client
Saving money, made gratifying.
Grand is one of America's pioneering Prize-Linked Savings apps — giving users a lottery-like thrill for every dollar they save, all backed by real bank accounts.
The Challenge
Every login is tied to a real bank account.
In the early days, Grand relied on its in-house dev team. As the product matured, demand for new features, updates, and bug fixes kept growing faster than the team could ship.
And security is paramount: every user's login is linked to their bank account, so extra steps have to protect their data at every point in the experience.
The Process
We rebuilt the back-end and remodeled the features that matter.
Grand came to Silicon Prime to overhaul its existing apps and sharpen the UX for clean functionality. We restructured the back-end to rebuild the four features users touch most.
Dashboard display
A cleaner home screen that puts savings, entries, and the next draw front and center.
Recurring savings
Set-and-forget auto-save so every contribution earns more chances to win, hands-free.
Prize drawings
A reliable, transparent draw engine — the lottery-like thrill that makes saving fun.
In-app referrals
A built-in referral program that rewards members for bringing friends along to save.
Rebuild the back-end and simplify the UX — so saving money feels as exciting as a lottery win.
Approach & Lessons
Why we rebuilt the back-end before touching the screens.
The faster-looking route would have been to keep bolting features onto the in-house codebase and reskin the screens users complained about. We took the slower one: restructure the back-end first, then rebuild the four features people touch most on top of it. The trade-off is real — a back-end restructure delays visible wins — but in a product where every login is tied to a live bank account, shipping new UI over a strained foundation just moves the risk downstream. Rebuilding the base is what let the dashboard, recurring savings, prize drawings, and referrals ship as a set rather than a pile of patches.
The easy thing to get wrong in a prize-linked savings app is treating the draw as a fun front-end animation. It isn't — it's the trust surface. Users are wagering real, bank-linked money on the promise that the draw is fair and the ledger is exact, so the "fun" feature carries the same correctness bar as a payment. That's why the reliable, transparent draw engine mattered more than any single screen: get the money and the odds right and the excitement takes care of itself; get them wrong and no amount of polish recovers it.
This approach has a clear limit: a foundation-first rebuild asks a client to fund work they can't see for a while, so it only pays off when the product is regulated, money-handling, or built to last. For a throwaway prototype or a UI-only refresh, the same effort would be over-engineering — we'd reskin and move on.
Reviewed June 2026 · Silicon Prime has partnered with Grand since January 2019.
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