Most financial products are optimized for transactions, not human emotion. For many people, this transforms an already fraught topic into pure anxiety. Our guest today is building banking for what she calls the Cortisol UI. Melissa Douros has spent over 26 years in financial services, starting in debt collection and now serving as the Chief Product Officer at Green Dot. Early on, she learned firsthand that shame is a terrible retention mechanism. That lesson now shapes how she builds financial products for millions of users — for whom the time spent simply navigating their finances can be the most stressful of the day. In this episode, Melissa shares: * How finserv companies can design for the “Cortisol UI“ by building trust and experiences that reduce anxiety before the transaction * An experiment she ran for Discover’s 5% cashback program where test users collapsed under decision paralysis — proving that more choice can actually increase financial stress * How she flipped Gre...