FIS · 2025 · Consumer vision lead · 2 min read
A five-year vision for how people move money
This started as a true 0-to-1 problem: a blank slate with no clear product shape. I helped turn it into a 5+ year vision and a tangible MVP direction leadership could get behind. Research gave us the foundation: people care about speed, cost, and certainty when moving money. That led us to a strategy where AI orchestrates the payment rails they already use, rather than trying to replace them.
- 231
- people screened for research
- 50+
- products torn down
- 70+
- concepts explored
- 15
- in the usability round
- Role
Senior Product Designer
Consumer vision lead
- Year
2025
- Team
Staff UX Research
Staff Product Designers
Senior Product Designer (me)
Product & Engineering partners
- Deliverables
Competitive analysis
Concept sprints
Interview mockups
Synthesis & MVP definition
Stakeholder vision deck
Problem
The company wanted a point of view on how people would move money through a bank-owned platform over the next five years. Not a feature, a direction, and one built to run on an intelligent, AI-driven engine rather than a stack of separate payment screens. The work was greenfield and high stakes: leadership needed something concrete enough to invest behind, drawn straight from research rather than assumption.
Role
I led the consumer phase as the sole senior designer, working alongside staff-level researchers and designers. The role ran on two tracks. One was design: holding the quality bar across a multi-designer sprint and keeping the concepts consistent enough to test as a single set. The other was product direction. I framed the questions, sequenced the phases, and kept stakeholders aligned.
Process
I started with the competition. Across six core money-movement use cases, I tore down more than fifty products to find the patterns worth keeping and the openings no one had taken.
Then two weeks of concept sprints. I pushed the team past seventy low-fidelity mobile concepts and held them to one level of fidelity and one visual language, so the set could be tested as a single body of work instead of a patchwork. We put those concepts in front of real users.
The interviews decided the MVP. I organized the feedback so the team could synthesize quickly, and the features and concepts that carried the most weight fell out of it. I cut the set to fifty-six screens, built the leading flows into a prototype, and ran a formal usability round with fifteen participants across the core money-movement scenarios. Those findings went back into the design before we built the vision deck and co-presented it to senior leadership.
Design
The research pointed to one bet: people no longer care about the rails underneath. They judge money movement by speed, cost, and certainty, the way they judge shipping a package. So the platform was designed to orchestrate money across those rails rather than replace them. It would learn how someone pays, surface what is owed and available to act on, suggest the next move rather than act on its own, and confirm that money arrived, from scheduled to delivered. I put that engine at the core of the MVP and held every concept to it.
Outcome
The consumer vision became an MVP direction leadership backed, and the research readout stayed in use on the payments work that followed. Owning the direction got design into the room early enough to shape where the investment went.