Cross-Border Remittance App
Lead Product Designer, July 2020–Present. Joined a cross-border remittance platform with no design system and no documented process, and built both while the company scaled to 100,000+ users and $10M+ in monthly transactions across NGN, CAD, GBP, and AUD corridors.
Lead Product Designer
My Role
Web & Mobile (iOS + Android)
Platform
Onboarding, KYC, Transfers, Design System
Focus
100,000+ users \ $10M+/mo
Outcome
The Business Stakes
Remittance is trust-critical by definition people are moving money to family, rent, and business obligations across borders, often through informal or first-time digital-finance experiences. A confusing flow doesn't just cost a conversion; it costs someone's ability to pay for something real. On top of that, every market (Nigeria, Canada, UK, Australia) carries its own regulatory and compliance requirements, so the product couldn't just be "one clean flow" it had to hold up across four different sets of constraints without fragmenting into four different products.
My Role
I joined as the design function's first senior hire. There was no component library, no documented pattern language, and every screen had been built ad hoc. I owned the full lifecycle research, journey mapping, wireframing, prototyping, usability testing, handoff first solo, then in coordination with compliance and operations as the team and product matured.
The Hard Problem
Design a single interface flexible enough for wildly different users varying financial literacy, languages, and devices across four regulatory jurisdictions, without either fragmenting into per-market UIs (which would kill delivery speed) or forcing one rigid pattern onto markets it didn't fit (which would kill usability).
Solution
The result is a component-based design system spanning onboarding, KYC, send-money, and wallet flows built to flex across markets rather than fork into separate versions per country. A single send-money flow adapts its verification steps, language support, and literacy-level patterns based on the corridor and user profile, instead of requiring four parallel designs. Every pattern in the system carries documented rationale, so new designers and engineers can extend it without re-deriving the reasoning from scratch.
Impact
100,000+ active users, $10M+ in monthly transaction volume
70% faster design-to-engineering handoff, after the design system gave the team which grew from one designer to three a shared language instead of repeated decisions
Onboarding completion and trust signals improved enough that the staged KYC pattern became the default across the product, not just the original test surface
What I'd Do Differently
I'd push to test the staged KYC pattern with compliance earlier I spent more time than I needed to building the case internally before bringing them real user data. The evidence would have made the conversation shorter and the decision less personal.
I'd also start the design system from day one instead of retrofitting it once the team grew. It's tempting to treat systems work as a luxury for later; it's actually cheapest when you build it before you need it.
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