July 28, 2025

From Concept to Prototype: Practical Guide to Fintech App Design

Having already created and redesigned over 40 financial technology products, ranging from payment apps and digital wallets to complex online banking solutions, lending platforms, and investment tools, here at Artkai, we know that fintech app design is much more than just sleek interfaces. It involves building a solid user experience and creating intuitive user journeys that drive user adoption, trust, engagement, and loyalty.

In this article, we unveil our approach to fintech product design, share some of our best practices, and demonstrate how we solve challenges that may arise in building financial applications, using the example of one of our clients, for whom we worked on an intelligent payment ecosystem.

Fintech App Design Process: Intelligent Payment Ecosystem Case Study

Client and Project

This project provided us with the opportunity to apply our approach in two distinct aspects: redesigning an existing, actively used fintech product for the web and subsequently creating a mobile application for it from scratch.

The client is one of the largest independent, fully vertically integrated omnichannel payments companies in the UK and EU. Founded in 2018, it helps over 65,000 merchants with its cutting-edge solutions for online, in-store, and on-the-go businesses, processing approximately £ 900 million monthly through 100,000 terminals and checkout pages. They approached Artkai with an initial request for a redesign of a smart web-based fintech solution that enables merchants to manage their payments online and offers various features that ensure a frictionless payment journey.

Having launched an MVP some time before and being extremely attentive to their users’ needs and pain points, the company had collected a significant amount of user feedback and gained a deep understanding of how to improve the product to make it even more helpful and user-friendly. Therefore, to reconsider the entire product and enhance it effectively, they sought to involve an experienced financial app design company with deep domain expertise in the field. They chose the Artkai team as their partner to elevate the fintech product to a new level. At the next stage, we designed a mobile application for the platform to further enhance the user experience, making it even better adapted to various interaction scenarios.

One of the reasons for their choice was Artkai’s reputation as a design-first company, involved in creating various complex products, including large enterprise solutions. Another key reason was our team's flexibility and broad experience in both outsourcing and outstaffing, which enables us to easily adapt to the client's preferred work and communication scheme, ensuring the most effective way to achieve the established goals.

In this case, the task for Artkai was to provide product design solutions that would meet their business goals and compliance requirements, significantly enhance user onboarding and experience, and be development-friendly.

Design Process

The user experience design process starts much earlier than the first line appears on the artboard. One of the key principles of Artkai’s financial app design approach is building a solid foundation of analysis and data that enables us to understand fintech app users deeply and make informed and wise decisions during the actual design process. In this particular case, the creative process started from the following important steps.

Desk research: here, we collected and analyzed the existing data about the product to get a deep understanding of the project, the field it operates in, and all the nuances that have to be considered
Competitor analysis: this stage involved analyzing and evaluating product competitors to define solutions that would enable the ecosystem to offer its users a better functionality and experience than the competition.
Key stakeholder interviews: we communicated closely with the client to gain valuable insights into the business and its objectives for its fintech products, and to better understand the portal and its everyday use cases.
User Personas: creating user personas is an effective way to empathize with users and build a seamless user experience that corresponds to actual users' needs and fulfills user expectations. In this case, it was an important stage not only because of the complexity of the fintech product but also because it serves very different types of users, such as sole entrepreneurs and LTDs, which require a different approach to user experience and the way the product communicates with them.
Customer journey mapping: this phase involved considering and visually representing the entire customer experience within the payment ecosystem. Systemic thinking encompassing all steps and touchpoints ensured that all solutions and interactions were intuitive and user-friendly, that all pain points were taken into account, and that the product is ready for a diverse range of scenarios.
Current product audit: this stage is essential to define a list of crucial usability problems in the existing fintech product interface. For this payment ecosystem, we applied heuristic analysis as a comprehensive method of evaluating the usability of the existing application. In the case of product redesign, it is also a way to ensure consistency and correspondence between the existing customer journey and the new one.
Backlog preparation and prioritization: here, we consolidated all insights and findings into a backlog—a step-by-step action plan that prioritizes essential features. It carefully arranged the diverse tasks of redesigning a complex financial product into a well-structured, clear system transparent to both the design team and the client’s team.
User interface design: at this stage, all the solutions were transformed into a consistent, visually appealing, and intuitive system of screens and clickable prototypes, making them easy to test. One more important feature that our clients always appreciate is that we provide development-friendly design assets, carefully arranged and well-prepared to ensure that the client’s development team has no issues understanding the design and turning it into a live product.

Challenges and Solutions

Working on this fintech product, the Artkai team faced several challenges; let’s look at a couple of them.

The first challenge was to make the product usable, learnable, and convenient for a wide range of users. Merchants within the payment ecosystem encompass a diverse range of businesses, from large corporations to small businesses and startups. As the platform is a solution for businesses, it contains a lot of business and financial terminology, and generally, the processes in it are more complicated than those in personal financial products. So, what seems to be an everyday thing for a big company can be difficult for the owners of small businesses or solo entrepreneurs. We strived to find ways to make the product clear and intuitive for all users and grow user confidence, in particular, by adding a variety of informative tool tips and visual elements, such as icons and input masks. We also provided handy visualizations, such as those that allow users to see how the merchant’s buyers will view the widget.

Another important challenge was creating a user-friendly onboarding process that, at the same time, would comply with all the regulations crucial in the financial industry. In complex fintech products, the onboarding process is one of the biggest obstacles on the way to turning a lead into a real client. Users want to quickly fill out the necessary form and start using the product; however, in this heavily regulated sphere, there are demands to submit a large amount of data and documents before the deal can be finalized. Among the solutions that helped us ease and speed up this process for users were:

Autofilling the fields everywhere where that was possible
Using the base for automated checking of person or company data, and only if it failed to cover a specific case, the system asked to add the documents manually
Saving the results at every single step, which is much more complicated technically and from the development side, but ensures a more user-friendly way to finalize the onboarding process and make the deal

Design solutions validation

Product design solutions for the payment ecosystem moved through several levels of validation:

Best practices and discovery results allowed us to ensure all the points of interaction with the product are user-friendly, clear, consistent, and employ popular mental models, reducing cognitive load
Demo session with the client’s team, which included the Product and Marketing Director, Software Engineering Director, Head of BPM, and Product Manager, allowed us to validate design solutions from the perspective of business processes, regulations, integrations, development, and attractive visual style
Feedback from real users allowed us to enhance the user experience in the next iterations of product updates

Outcomes

Artkai team redesigned major functionality of the fintech platform and then expanded the ecosystem’s impact by designing a native mobile application for it. The results the client enjoyed in particular included:

18% of new user growth during the first few months after the launch of the redesigned platform
2.3x decreased churn rate during the first two weeks of users' engagement with the platform
Considerably enhanced usability of the product leading to 2x higher user adoption, satisfaction, and engagement
Convenience, accessibility, and efficiency of usage across platforms and operating systems, as the ecosystem now effectively works on web and mobile, iOS and Android

This fintech app design project evolved into a long-term collaboration: Artkai has already been in its fourth year of helping this client boost the evolution of their product. Satisfied with our design approach, domain knowledge, and understanding of their business goals, the client returns to our team with new iterations of updates and enhancements that support their user satisfaction and business growth.

How Artkai Solves Critical Challenges in Fintech App Design

Working on a UX design for a financial application, it’s impossible to avoid a variety of challenges that may be critical for a positive user experience. Let’s look closer at design principles and ways to solve the challenges that Artkai’s fintech app design approach includes.

Effective design principles for fintech apps

Having designed a variety of financial technology products, Artkai’s team has defined the most effective design principles. Depending on the specific project's conditions and requirements, we can base user experience design solutions on:

Design Thinking. This is perhaps the most flexible approach, allowing us to quickly validate ideas within cross-functional teams. It is based on human-centered problem-solving solutions, grounded in a deep understanding of users’ needs and the goals they strive to achieve with the fintech product.
Service Design for Multichannel Services. The service design approach at a more advanced level focuses on establishing a seamless user experience for both users and service providers. It is effective in cases either when businesses want to build new fintech applications or when our clients strive to improve existing fintech products and are ready to significantly transform the current user experience for the benefit of both the user and the business.

Avoiding critical mistakes

Operations with money and financial transactions have always been a very sensitive area for fintech product users. A simple mistake, such as typing the wrong number or misclicking, can lead to financial loss or, in the case of a business account, result in fines or harm to the business. That’s why potentially dangerous actions that can harm the user's financial state should never be simple and obvious for the user. We deliberately hide and complexify them, while also adding numerous informational notifications that explain, in simple terms, the consequences of the users’ actions. Additionally, we design negative flows so that for each mistake or error, the system provides a unique feedback that clearly explains what happened and how to resolve the issue.

Balancing compliance and usability

Complex KYC/AML processes often result in lengthy, multi-step onboarding procedures that lead to high drop-off rates. We find ways to ensure regulatory requirements don’t hurt user experience. Our close collaboration with the client’s legal team ensures that we are aware of all the nuances and properly understand the laws and regulations of their specific country or region. That helps us prevent our clients from experiencing problems due to specific issues, even such as the absence of a disclaimer. We also thoroughly examine the banking systems of clients’ particular countries or regions to provide the fintech product users with clear instructions and a smooth user experience.

Another essential aspect is that we provide users with clear and understandable information and explanations on why the app requires their personal or business data. The fintech applications we create employ transparent data usage policies and the trust factors, for example, notifying the users that their personal or business data is secure and protected and will not be sold, which obviously has to be true and means that our client’s fintech service has its own encryption system or utilizes integration with KYC/KYB services.

Onboarding and user activation

Multiple fintech projects, including an intelligent payment ecosystem, demonstrate that effective user onboarding and activation are among the biggest challenges in digital products that handle users’ money and business or personal data. We view good onboarding as a critical part of service design, where the user flow aligns with the business’s approach and capabilities. We employ techniques that help achieve results while also simplifying and speeding up the process in each specific case.

Sometimes, the best solution is to obtain the user’s phone number using a short form and then provide full-scale support in guiding them through all onboarding stages together. In other cases, it is more efficient to automate the onboarding process, which will be technically more challenging due to additional work for developers and will be more expensive because of the cost of side services and integrations; however, it will allow the fintech service to avoid missing introverted leads.

Anyway, the main rule here is to be honest with users, keeping them aware of the form's size and the number of steps, providing clear explanations, and allowing them to track their progress.

Complex data visualization

For fintech app design, data visualization is a key aspect, as it significantly impacts the usability, engagement, and desirability of the product. And for us, that’s one of the favorite parts of a design job for fintech products, as that’s the area where a designer can totally focus on the users’ comfort and convenience instead of business and legal regulations. Our design team utilizes established best practices for data visualization design, including the Job-to-be-done approach, which focuses on the user’s ultimate objective. This approach presents the data efficiently, based on understanding why the user needs it rather than just what they want to see.

Cross-platform design consistency

One of the challenges for complex digital products is ensuring a consistent and accessible user experience across all platforms that users access, such as web, iOS, and Android. Yet, practice shows that in most cases, mobile and web users are not the same people. Most users tend to use a particular platform more frequently for various reasons, and this aspect can be determined by their user role and the tasks they solve with the fintech product. For example, accountants will prefer to use the desktop application to periodically analyze data and create necessary documents, whereas managers will use the mobile app on a daily basis to quickly respond to fraud activity.

That’s why consistency shouldn’t be confused with sameness. We consider user comfort and convenient patterns for using a fintech solution on a particular device more important than making all the solutions uniform. Personal finance products, such as online banking or finance management apps, are more common and convenient for users in the form of mobile applications. Meanwhile, complex B2B products are still web-first, as working with large data volumes and complex tables remains challenging to adapt to mobile screens.

Designing for multiple user types

Financial apps often involve various types of users that serve different roles, and each type requires tailored flows, interactions, and dashboards. Certainly, there is no one universal solution for all, so in each case, we find an approach that is appropriate for the specific business objectives and convenient for users of this particular product.

In some cases, we recommend using the block structure when a part of functionality, such as particular pages or sections, can be switched off for certain types of users with lower access rights without compromising performance or visual presentation. In other cases, clients already have different platforms for various types of their fintech app users, such as client and admin platforms. In these instances, we will focus on improving their user experience design separately.

Artkai’s Financial App Design Benefits for Clients

The major benefits clients appreciate about choosing Artkai for fintech app design services include:

Diversity of practical experience in the field. Artkai has a vast portfolio of fintech projects for the USA and Europe, so we are familiar with the specific limits, rules, and regulations typical of different areas. Furthermore, we have experience in developing globally functioning fintech products adjusted for specific markets. Therefore, we are aware of the challenges and pitfalls that lie ahead and are prepared to address them.
Deep domain expertise. We understand the language, logic, and regulations of financial products, from KYC flows and PCI compliance to interchange fees and embedded lending. This means the client saves time and effort onboarding our team into the project as we are on the same page.
Flexible and collaborative partnership. Artkai doesn’t just do the task; we work as an embedded partner within a client’s team. We easily adapt to the client’s workflow, communication style, and velocity. Whether collaborating daily with the product team or syncing weekly with the CEO, we make every conversation flexible, focused, and valuable.
Enterprise-ready thinking. With experience in creating and redesigning large enterprise-level products, we understand how large organizations make decisions. We build our estimations, processes, and timelines with multi-level coordination in mind, from marketing and compliance to product leads and executives.
Multichannel, scalable design. In the fintech sphere, we are experienced in designing for multi-platform, multi-role systems, including enterprise-scale banking apps with a variety of touchpoints. We know how to create future-proof design systems that are ready to scale and adapt to the actual market demands, while also being cost-efficient for our clients.

Bottom Line

As you can see from our client’s case study described in this article, Artkai’s fintech app design approach extends far beyond addressing functional problems or creating a cohesive visual identity. With wise and constructive design solutions, we help our clients in the financial industry achieve significant, tangible results, such as growing their user base, increasing user satisfaction and adoption, boosting sales, and driving revenue growth.

At Artkai, we approach design for financial technology products as a strategic tool that helps businesses confidently operate in the fintech market, offer competitive and highly performing solutions, and scale with confidence, whether it's a personal finance application or a large enterprise-level product.

If you’re planning to design or redesign a fintech product and need a partner who combines strategy, research, and execution, let’s talk.