How to design a fintech app that builds trust, reduces friction, and creates better customer experiences

One of the biggest lessons I've learned is that you shouldn't start designing the interface before understanding the product behind it.

If a founder comes to me with a fintech product, my first question isn't going to be, "What should the app look like?" I want to sit down and understand the product, how it works, how the different financial products operate, and how the team behind it actually handles the customer experience.

That includes understanding what happens outside the app as well. Sometimes a user needs to make a special request that involves an executive or another platform. Sometimes a problem cannot be solved inside the interface. Sometimes the support team needs to intervene.

These things matter because UX doesn't exist in isolation.

UX guides the user, but it doesn't solve technical or structural problems inside the product. You can create the clearest flow in the world, but if the financial product doesn't work properly or the support team can't solve a user's problem, the experience is still going to fail.

That's why I see UX as one part of a much larger customer experience.

When I think about what makes people trust a financial app, I don't immediately think about colors, typography, animations, or how modern the interface looks.

For me, trust starts with the quality of the products the financial institution offers, how quickly those products work, and how effectively the company responds when something goes wrong. If I have a problem with my money and the company resolves it quickly, that creates trust. If the financial products are useful and work as expected, that creates trust too. The interface is part of that experience, but it's not the entire experience.

This is why I don't believe a beautiful banking app can compensate for poor financial products or poor customer support. The UI can make the experience easier, clearer, and more pleasant, but it can't fix a structural problem inside the business.

The best fintech experiences are built when the product, the operation, the support team, and the interface are all working toward the same goal.

One of the most useful things I learned through benchmarking is that there is already a solid foundation of patterns that people understand when using financial products.

Not every flow needs to be reinvented.

People already have mental models for things like checking their balance, looking at transactions, transferring money, managing cards, or requesting a financial product. Changing these patterns simply because we want the product to look different can create unnecessary friction.

Benchmarking helped me understand what users already expect, identify opportunities for improvement, and avoid mistakes that other banks had already made.

The goal isn't to copy another bank.

It's to understand what already works and then find the right moments to improve it.

Sometimes a small detail in an existing flow is enough to guide the user toward the final goal without forcing them to learn an entirely new way of doing something.

We're living in an increasingly connected world, and most people have powerful technology in their hands every day. But there is still a significant gap between people and technology.

Something that feels obvious to a designer can feel completely new to someone who isn't familiar with technology.

This becomes especially important in financial products because mistakes can feel much more serious. You're not just navigating a content platform; you're moving money, requesting credit, opening accounts, or making decisions about your finances.

The UX needs to guide users almost by the hand.

That doesn't mean creating huge explanations for every action. It means being explicit when it matters.

Imagine that someone wants to open a dollar account. Instead of forcing them to interpret a generic product name, the interface should make the choice obvious: Do you want to open a dollar account or a local currency account?

The language can be descriptive without becoming a wall of text.

That balance is important. Users need enough information to make the right decision, but they shouldn't have to read an essay to complete a simple financial task.

One of the first problems we identified while working on a banking app was the thumb zone. Some buttons and actions were positioned in ways that made the interface harder to navigate, and the overall structure felt unnecessarily disorganized.

We started cleaning things up: improving the visual balance, making options clearer, adding descriptions where they were needed, and using button sizes that were easier to interact with, especially for people who might not have perfect vision.

These changes weren't about making the app more visually impressive. They were about making it easier to understand and easier to use.

I've always believed that having more colors or more visual elements doesn't automatically make an interface better. In a financial app, transactions should often be quick and focused.

Users shouldn't have to navigate through visual distractions just to complete something simple.

Sometimes a fintech product tries too hard to communicate that it is modern, beautiful, and highly designed.

But financial products don't necessarily need more visual complexity.

They need minimalism, simplicity, and good taste.

There's another balance that I think is particularly important in fintech: simplicity doesn't mean hiding information.

If a user wants to understand something in depth, that information should be available. It can live behind a "more details" interaction or another progressive disclosure pattern, but it shouldn't simply disappear because we decided the interface needs to look clean.

There will always be users who want to understand more before making a financial decision.

That is especially true when money is involved.

The goal isn't to remove information.

The goal is to organize it so that users can understand what they need at the moment they need it, while still giving them the opportunity to go deeper when they want to.

Some financial flows naturally create more anxiety than others. Applying for credit is an obvious example, as is requesting a new financial product or card. But even something as simple as saving money can become stressful if the user doesn't understand where their money went or can't find the account where they expected it to be.

That's why I don't think there's a single answer to what creates friction in a financial app. It depends on the person, the product, and the context.

What I'm more certain about is the role of the interface: we need to guide people through these moments with clear and simple steps.

When money is involved, uncertainty becomes much more expensive from a UX perspective. The user should know where they are, what is happening, what they need to do, and what will happen next.

If someone asks me to design a fintech product tomorrow, I wouldn't start by opening Figma. I'd start by sitting down with the team.

I want to understand the products, how they actually work, what the complete flow looks like, what happens outside the app, which teams are involved, how support works, and where the business currently has limitations.

Only after understanding that context does it make sense to start designing the experience.

This is also why I believe research and benchmarking are so important. You need to understand the people you're designing for, but you also need to understand the environment in which the product exists.

The best interface is not necessarily the one with the most innovative interaction. Sometimes it's the one that understands what users already know and removes everything that gets in their way.

After working on financial products, I've come to see trust as something much bigger than UI. A fintech app can have a beautiful interface, but if its products aren't useful, if transactions are unreliable, or if the support team can't solve problems, the interface won't be enough.

UX can guide the user. It can reduce cognitive load, make complex processes easier to understand, and help people complete important tasks with confidence. But it is only one part of the experience.

For me, good fintech UX means understanding the product before designing it, learning from patterns that users already know, identifying where those patterns can be improved, and creating a simple path through experiences that can otherwise feel intimidating.

The goal isn't to impress users with the interface.

It's to make them feel confident enough to use the product, solve what they came to solve, and come back again.

Good fintech UX should make users return to your app with confidence and trust.