Jay Frank / Patent Work

TD Bank · Visionary of the Year 2025 · Finalist · Sole Inventor

VISIONARY OF THE YEAR ★ TD BANK ★ FINALIST ★ 2025 SOLE INVENTOR

Move one number. Everything answers.

A patent submission that turns personal financial management into a living system. Adjust a savings goal and the budget rebalances, the timeline shifts, and recommendations appear, all in real time, all on one screen. Invented, designed, and prototyped by one person.

InventionAutomated Adjustment of Visual Elements in a Personal Financial Management System
InventorJay Frank, Human-Centered Design
Reviewed byTD Intellectual Property & Ideation Committee, Nov 2025
Fig. 1Working model, try it

A budget that answers back

Drag any slider, including the date you want. Watch the projection, the timeline, and the budget respond the way the invention does, and let it fix the plan for you when you drift.

System recommendation
Projected goal date
Dec 2026

Dining
Lifestyle
Transportation
This miniature runs the core patent claim in your browser: user input on any financial element triggers automated, real-time adjustment of every dependent visual element, with recommendations generated when a goal drifts off track.
1 of 3
finalists for TD Bank's Visionary of the Year, selected from inventions across the enterprise
The only solo entry
every other finalist was a full team. This concept was invented, written, and prototyped by one person
4 lines of business
one adaptive engine designed to scale across retail, small business, commercial, and wealth
01 · The problem

Banking apps show you numbers. They never show you consequences.

A parent sits at the kitchen table after bedtime, moving numbers around to make next month work. Soccer fees, a surprise repair, a summer trip they hope they can afford. Every change raises the same question: if I do this, what happens to that?

Today's tools cannot answer it. Budgets and savings goals live on separate screens, connected in reality but disconnected in the interface. TD's own concept research found people misreading static dashboards, unsure what a monthly total meant or whether a red number was a charge or a balance. The math is left to the customer, and that is exactly where clarity breaks down.

The insight behind this invention was a single question: why don't we show people how their savings affect their budget, and how their budget affects their savings?

02 · The invention

Four capabilities, written the way a patent sees them.

Claim 01

Bidirectional real-time rebalancing

Change a savings goal and the budget recalculates. Change a budget category and the goal's end date moves. Every dependent element updates live, in the same view, while the user is still deciding. No save button, no second screen, no mental math.

Claim 02

Feasibility detection and recommendations

The system knows when a goal has become unreachable under the current budget. Instead of letting the user fail quietly, it interrupts with specifics: what changed, what it costs in time, and which categories have room to give. Recommendations are generated from the user's own spending patterns.

Claim 03

Motion as meaning

Scaling, color, and contextual highlights direct attention to what a change actually affects. A timeline that visibly stretches communicates a delayed goal faster than any table. The animation is not decoration; it is the explanation.

Claim 04

One engine, every line of business

The same adaptive logic that rebalances a family's vacation fund can rebalance a small business's cash flow or a wealth client's retirement plan. It is designed as an overlay service on core banking systems, deployable across segments without replacing them.

03 · The figures

Three flows from the working prototype.

These are the actual screens submitted with the patent filing, designed at production fidelity in TD's design language. Each flow shows the same engine reacting to a different human moment. Select a step and the phone follows.

Screens scroll inside the frame

    Fig. 5Recorded walkthrough

    The prototype in motion

    Screens tell you what the system decides. Motion shows you how it feels to be answered in real time. This recording walks the two flows above where the engine does its most visible work: the positive path, where trimming a goal earns a green early-finish confirmation, and the date-first path, where picking a new month recalculates the contribution and frees up cash on the spot.

    Captured directly from the interactive prototype, at real interaction speed, with no cuts.

    Fig. 3 · Reward the winFig. 4 · Pick a date instead1 min 39 sec
    04 · Modeled impact

    Empathy, priced for a steering committee.

    The pitch to the committee was not "nicer charts." It was that clarity is a growth engine: customers who can see consequences make more decisions, keep more products, and call support less. The projections below were modeled for the review using industry benchmarks, JD Power digital-banking studies, and TD pilot data.

    +5–10%
    Managed deposit uplift

    Personalized savings journeys encourage consistent deposits and reinvestment, modeled from comparable digital savings launches at North American banks.

    +15–25%
    Digital cross-sell conversion

    Predictive insights surface lending, wealth, and protection offers at the moment they are relevant, not in a generic campaign.

    $835M–$1.5B
    Modeled 3-year value

    Combined value across deposit growth, conversion, retention, and reduced cost-to-serve, against an estimated $10–20M build.

    Figures are projections prepared for the TD Visionary of the Year review, not audited results. Methodology combined peer-institution benchmarks, Layer6 AI simulations, and conversion ratios from comparable banking transformations.

    06 · Read as a signal

    What this project says about how I work.

    InventionI find the idea nobody scoped

    This did not come from a roadmap. It came from watching people struggle and asking a question the product had never asked. Then it was written up rigorously enough to enter a patent pipeline and out-place entire teams.

    Design craftI build the evidence, not just the deck

    Production-fidelity prototypes in the bank's own design language, three complete flows, every state accounted for: warnings, recoveries, positive paths, and edge cases like unreachable dates.

    AI fluencyI design for prediction, not just screens

    Feasibility detection, behavioral recommendations, and an agentic assistant concept all treat AI as a design material: something that anticipates, explains, and acts, while the human stays in control.

    Business thinkingI argue value in the committee's language

    The submission modeled deposits, conversion, retention, and cost-to-serve against build cost, because an idea only ships when the people funding it can see its consequences too.