Verona Smith — Fintech & Payments Product Design

In fintech, the handoff is where the regulator's requirement becomes the developer's guess.Design finishes. The files go over the wall. Three weeks later the KYC step has an extra screen nobody approved, the fee appears after the amount instead of before it, and the failure state says "something went wrong" — because the developer hit a case the design didn't cover and made a reasonable call under deadline. None of it was a mistake. All of it changes how the product behaves with someone's money.Running design and engineering as two vendors makes it worse, since now there's a seam, and each side can point at the other while the compliance deadline moves.We don't hand off. Design and engineering sit in the same team and the same weekly cycle, so edge cases — and in fintech most of the product is edge cases — get resolved once, by two people who both own the result.In two months you get a working financial product: designed, built, integrated with your providers, tested and deployed. Code and design files are yours.How it runs:— Week 1–2: discovery, money-path flows, and the constraint map — licence, KYC tiers, rails, provider APIs — locked by design and engineering together, so nothing gets specified that can't ship— Week 3–5: design and build in parallel, with weekly working builds you can actually transact in— Week 6–8: edge states, compliance review, QA, security, deployment and handoverWhat you get:— Full UX and UI in Figma, with a component library— Production frontend built against that library— Backend and API work, or integration with your existing stack— Integrations: KYC and verification providers, payment rails, card issuing, banking-as-a-service partners— Admin, support and compliance review tooling— Responsive web, plus native mobile where the product needs it— Testing, deployment, documentation and handover— Your code, your repos, your design filesTypical engagements: fintech MVP design and development, neobank and digital banking build, payment platform and payment gateway development, wallet and remittance apps, card and BIN programme products, B2B payouts, embedded finance, lending and BNPL, KYC and compliance tooling, fintech product rebuild and re-platforming.We work as one team at U1CORE — design and engineering together, so what gets approved is what gets shipped. Platforms in this portfolio have processed $720M+ in production payments.

Financial products are the only ones where the user is deciding, on every screen, whether to trust you with money they can't get back.That decision isn't made by the brand. It's made by small things: whether the fee was shown before or after the amount, whether "pending" came with a time, whether the error said what to do next, whether the balance matched what they expected. Get those wrong and no amount of visual polish recovers it — people don't articulate distrust, they just don't complete the transfer.Most fintech design treats this as a styling exercise. It isn't. The constraints come first: what your licence allows, what your KYC tier unlocks, what your rails make possible and how fast, what compliance must collect. Design that starts from a dribbble aesthetic and meets those constraints later gets rebuilt twice.In four weeks you get a complete, buildable product: every screen on the money path, every state behind it, and a design system your team can keep extending.What we design:— Onboarding and account opening, with progressive KYC— Identity verification, document capture, and the rejection and retry paths— Wallet or account home: balance, activity, primary actions— Send, request, top-up, withdraw and transfer flows— Checkout and payment gateway, with fee disclosure before the commitment— Authorisation: 3-D Secure, SCA, biometrics, confirmation steps— Cards: virtual and physical, limits, freeze, PIN, replacement— Transactions: history, detail, search, filtering, export, statements— Refunds, chargebacks and dispute flows— Every edge state: empty, pending, failed, expired, blocked, insufficient funds— Operator side: support console, transaction oversight, compliance review— Responsive web and native mobile where the product needs both— Full design system, component library and developer-ready Figma handoffTypical engagements: fintech product design, neobank and digital banking apps, payment platform and payment gateway design, digital wallet and crypto wallet products, remittance and cross-border transfers, card and BIN programmes, B2B payments and payout platforms, embedded finance, lending and BNPL flows, investment and trading interfaces, marketplace payout systems.Work runs as part of U1CORE — design and engineering in one team, so what gets approved is what gets shipped. Platforms in this portfolio have processed $720M+ in production payments.

KYC is where fintech products lose the users they already paid to acquire.The flow asks for documents before it explains why. It rejects without saying what to fix. It leaves people waiting with no status and no estimate. Compliance is satisfied; the funnel is not — and because the compliance team owns the requirement and the product team owns the screen, nobody owns the gap between them.Most of that loss isn't regulatory. The rules say what you must collect and verify. They almost never say in what order, on which screen, with what wording, or what the user sees while they wait.That part is design, and it's usually the part nobody designed. In three weeks you get a verification journey that satisfies your compliance obligations and still converts — every step justified, every rejection recoverable, every wait explained.What we design:— Tiered KYC: what a user can do at each level, and what unlocks the next one— Progressive collection: what to ask now, what to defer until the user has a reason to give it— Document capture: guidance, framing, retry, and the failure modes that cause most re-submissions— Liveness and selfie steps, with the copy that stops people abandoning at the camera prompt— Address, source of funds and PEP declarations without the legal wall of text— KYB for business accounts: entity structure, UBO chains, authorised signatories, supporting documents— Sanctions and watchlist hits: what the user is told, and what they aren't— Manual review: status, expected time, and what the user can do meanwhile— Rejection and remediation: what went wrong, what to change, how to retry— Document expiry and periodic re-verification, before it blocks the account— The internal side: compliance reviewer queue, case view, decision and audit trail— Full design system and developer-ready Figma handoffTypical engagements: KYC flow design, KYB and business onboarding, AML and sanctions screening UX, identity and document verification, neobank and digital banking account opening, crypto exchange and wallet onboarding, payment platform merchant onboarding, compliance reviewer tooling, regulated fintech product design.Work runs as part of U1CORE — design and engineering in one team, so the flows are specified against the verification providers you actually use. Platforms in this portfolio have processed $720M+ in production payments.

A wallet is judged in the first ninety seconds, and lost in the first five.Onboarding is where a financial product asks for the most and has earned the least. A stranger wants an ID, a selfie, a phone number and a bank connection — before showing anything worth staying for. Most wallets respond by making the form shorter. That isn't the problem. The problem is the order: value is promised after the friction instead of before it.Then the wallet itself has the opposite failure. It opens on a balance and a wall of equal-weight buttons, and the one thing the user came to do — send, top up, check whether yesterday's transfer landed — takes three taps to find.In three weeks you get both designed as one journey: an onboarding that earns each piece of information it asks for, and a wallet whose home screen answers the question the user opened the app with.What we design:— Onboarding: value-first sequence, signup, phone and email verification, progressive KYC, bank or card linking— The friction map: what gets asked at which tier, and what can wait until the user has a reason to give it— Wallet home: balance, recent activity, primary action, and the hierarchy that puts them in the right order— Send, request, top-up and withdraw flows, with confirmation and authorisation steps— Multi-currency and multi-asset views where the product needs them— Transaction history, detail views, search and filtering— Cards: virtual and physical, limits, freeze, PIN, replacement— Every state nobody designs: empty wallet, pending, failed, rejected KYC, expired document, insufficient balance— Notifications and the moments the product should speak first— Full design system and developer-ready Figma handoffTypical engagements: digital wallet app design, crypto wallet and web3 wallet UX, neobank and digital banking onboarding, e-wallet and remittance apps, KYC onboarding flows, card and account opening journeys, top-up and payout flows, fintech mobile app design, multi-currency wallet interfaces.Work runs as part of U1CORE — design and engineering in one team, so what gets approved is what gets shipped. Platforms in this portfolio have processed $720M+ in production payments.

In fintech, the expensive mistake isn't building the wrong screen.It's building the right screen for a product the regulator, the bank partner or the unit economics won't allow.Most fintech roadmaps are written as if the constraints appear later. They don't. The licence you're operating under decides what onboarding can look like. The BIN sponsor decides which card features exist. The payment rails decide what "instant" means. The KYC tier decides how much a user can do before you've verified them. Design that ignores this gets redrawn twice — once by compliance, once by the partner bank.In two weeks you get a product direction that already accounts for all of it: what to build, for whom, in what order, and what each decision costs under your actual constraints.Week one — market and competitor read across 3–5 fintech products in your category, a map of your regulatory and partner constraints, and interviews with your team and, where possible, four of your users.Week two — two working sessions, then the written strategy.What we work through:— Who the product is actually for, and which segment unit economics support— The regulatory and licensing constraints that shape the product before design starts— KYC tiering: what a user can do at each level, and where to place the friction— Money movement: rails, timings, fees, and what the user is told about each— Pricing, interchange, take rate and the behaviour each one creates— Trust: what a financial product has to show before someone moves money through it— The roadmap, sequenced — with what to cut named explicitlyYou get:— Written product strategy with a sequenced quarter-by-quarter roadmap— Competitor teardown of 3–5 fintech products, flow by flow— Core user flows and information architecture— User personas grounded in research, not assumption— Constraint map: regulatory, partner and technical, with design implications for each— A "not now" list: what to stop working on, and why— Two 90-minute working sessions plus a follow-up threadTypical engagements: fintech product discovery, neobank and digital banking strategy, payment platform and payment gateway planning, wallet and remittance product definition, KYC and compliance flow strategy, B2B payments and payout products, embedded finance, card and BIN programme design, MVP scoping for fintech startups.Work runs as part of U1CORE — design and engineering in one team, so the strategy comes with a realistic view of what it takes to build.Platforms in this portfolio have processed $720M+ in production payments.

Payment products don't lose money at the payment. They lose it three screens earlier.The chart shows a conversion drop and everyone looks at the checkout button. But the user already left — at the KYC step that asked for a document they didn't have on hand, at the fee that appeared only after the amount was entered, at the "processing" state that never said how long processing takes, or at the error that said "transaction failed" and nothing else.Every one of those is a design decision someone made quickly, and none of them show up as a payments problem in the dashboard. They show up as churn.In one week you get a map of where money stops moving in your product — each stall point named, what it costs, and a ranked list of fixes ordered by revenue recovered rather than by effort.I run a full payments UX audit against your real drop-off data, not opinions: signup and onboarding, KYC and identity verification, KYB for business accounts, AML and compliance steps, funding, top-up and payment method selection, amount entry and fee disclosure, checkout and payment gateway flow, 3-D Secure and SCA authorisation, pending and failure states, refunds, chargebacks and disputes, plus wallet balances, transfers and transaction history.What you get:— Annotated walkthrough of every screen on the money path— Each drop-off point named, with the reason and estimated cost— Ranked fix list: what to change first, and what it's worth— KYC and compliance UX reviewed for friction that regulation doesn't actually require— Error, pending and edge-case states reviewed specifically - the screens nobody designs and everybody hits— A written audit document your team can act on, plus a 60-minute walkthrough callTypical engagements: fintech app UX audit, neobank and digital banking onboarding, payment platform and payment gateway checkout, digital wallet and crypto wallet UX, card and transaction interfaces, remittance and transfer flows, KYC/KYB and AML compliance design, subscription and recurring billing UX, marketplace payout and seller payment flows, financial services product design.Work runs as part of U1CORE — design and engineering in one team, so the fixes are specified in a form developers can build from.Platforms in this portfolio have processed $720M+ in production payments.