At Trade Republic, the team has always looked at the holiday season as an opportunity to create something special for their users. Last year, they introduced Stock Gifting, a feature designed to make gifting more meaningful—allowing users to invest in their loved ones’ futures with stocks and ETFs that last beyond just a single moment.

Their goal was to craft an engaging and interactive gifting experience, one that felt personal, intuitive, and delightful. To achieve this, they leveraged the power of Play and Rive, enabling them to design smooth, dynamic interactions that brought the feature to life.

Using Play, the Trade Republic team was able to:

1. Create faster design cycles → Shortening time from concept to prototype, accelerating innovation.

2. Design a higher quality user experience → Reducing UX flaws before launch ensured higher adoption and engagement.

3. See cost savings in development → Fewer rounds of engineering rework save both time and resources.

By leveraging Play, Trade Republic successfully launched Stock Gifting, enabling users to gift over 1,000,000 stocks worth 50+ million euros in just two months.

For this customer story, we talked with Chethan KVS, a Product Designer at Trade Republic who designed the gifting feature.

The Design & Prototyping Process

Chethan started designing the feature in Figma but when it got to the time where he wanted to begin prototyping some of the different flows and ideas he had, he started to experience challenges.

"While the initial prototype in Figma helped convey the core design and flow, I needed to create an interactive, dynamic prototype that felt truly real. That's where Play was really powerful. Play allowed me to share the prototype directly with colleagues in the office and get instant feedback.

I could quickly identify areas of confusion, ask questions to gauge their understanding, and uncover how they felt about the experience. With their insights, I could refine the prototype, iterate on the design, and return for additional feedback. The process was truly remarkable."

Chethan explained that he wanted the gift reveal to be an interactive experience — something users actively engage with, rather than simply seeing the gift unwrapped. He looked for inspiration and ultimately decided on using Rive to create the gift reveal animation.

Play's Powerful Rive Integration

Play offers the most advanced support for integrating your Rive files than any other design or prototyping tool right now. You can easily import your Rive files but also control them in Play and have access to the actions you create in Rive's state machine directly within Play.

"Play’s ability to import Rive files was a game-changer. It allowed me to quickly test every exported .riv file directly on my iPhone, without needing any involvement from engineers," said Chethan.

Tap on the GIF from your iPhone to experience a native prototype using Play's App Clips feature.

"To generate excitement and boost the adoption of the gifting feature, we introduced a lottery as part of our Christmas campaign. Anyone who gifted a stock was automatically entered for a chance to win up to €10,000 in stocks. Since the campaign was only running for a few weeks, we aimed to make the experience as engaging and thrilling as possible.

Building this feature at scale has made it effortless to repurpose for future campaigns or even for gifting our own employees."

The Impact on the Product & Business

1. Facilitating Real-Time Feedback & Cross-Team Collaboration

Traditional prototyping tools often require developers to interpret simulations and attempt to translate them into working products. Play eliminates this gap by enabling fully interactive, native prototypes that stakeholders—from designers to engineers—can experience in real-time. For Trade Republic, this meant:

• Faster Decision-Making: Instead of debating abstract design choices, teams could interact with a live prototype and provide immediate, experience-based feedback.

• Better Stakeholder Alignment: Play made it easier to communicate design intent across product, design, and engineering teams, ensuring everyone was on the same page before development began.

2. Enabling Rapid Iteration & Reducing Development Bottlenecks

A major challenge with designing interactions is a slow iteration cycle. With Play, the team could:

• Prototype Advanced Interactions: Designers could build, test, and tweak interactions directly within Play instead of relying on developers to implement every iteration.

• Refine the User Journey in Real Time: Small but critical UX refinements—such as button behaviors, transitions, and gestures—could be tested and optimized before a single line of production code was written.

This significantly reduced engineering rework, allowing the development team to build with confidence, knowing that the design had already been validated through Play.

3. Enhancing the User Experience with High-Fidelity Prototyping

Trade Republic wanted its Stock Gifting feature to feel delightful, intuitive, and engaging—qualities that are difficult to assess with static screens or even traditional prototypes. With Play, the team was able to:

• Make it Real: Prototypes weren’t just simulations; they behaved like the real app, allowing designers to test micro-interactions, animations, and gestures.

• Identify Pain Points Early: Rather than waiting until development to discover usability issues, the team detected and resolved friction points in the early design phase.

By the time development started, Trade Republic had full confidence that the Stock Gifting experience was smooth, engaging, and ready for users.

The Business Impact

For fast-moving fintech companies like Trade Republic, where time-to-market and user experience are competitive advantages, Play provides:

1. Faster design cycles → Shortened time from concept to prototype, accelerating innovation.

2. Higher-quality user experiences → Reducing UX flaws before launch ensures higher adoption and engagement.

3. Cost savings in development → Fewer rounds of engineering rework save both time and resources.

Play isn’t just a design & prototyping tool—it’s a strategic asset for companies looking to build high-quality, interactive user experiences faster and more efficiently. For fintech, where trust, ease of use, and engagement are paramount, having the ability to iterate quickly and refine every detail before development can make all the difference.

Read the behind the scenes case study on the Trade Republic Blog.

If you're looking to get started with Rive and Play, check out Chethan's free course on YouTube!