Context
Crediverso is a bilingual fintech serving the US Hispanic community. In 2020 the company became the first in the US to offer credit checks in Spanish for free. I joined for 22 months as design lead on the consumer mobile banking app, partnering with a product manager, an engineering team, and a third-party graphic designer.
The mandate was to ship V1 of an all-in-one bilingual banking product in a market that had been failed by fragmented, English-only financial tooling.
The Problem
US Hispanic consumers face structural barriers in financial services: language gaps in primary product flows, fragmented multi-product experiences, and a lack of family-aware products that match how Hispanic households actually move money.
Three product goals from the start:
- A single account where users could engage multiple partners and products without leaving the app
- Bilingual availability across every step of the experience, not just marketing surfaces
- A family and friends feature enabling virtual cash sharing across household members
Customer Insights
We synthesized Zoom interviews, web analytics, social media feedback, and competitor analyses into three customer avatars that were referenced through every sprint. Three findings drove the product direction:
- 79% of US Hispanics consider sending money home important, and 75% use remittance services. Remittance is a primary banking use case, not an edge feature.
- 41 million Americans are Spanish-dominant, and preference for Spanish rises sharply when dealing with complex financial terminology. Bilingual is a core flow requirement, not a translation pass.
- 81% of surveyed Hispanics said relatives who were not fluent in English asked them to research purchases on their behalf. Financial decisions in this market are family-coordinated, not individual.
Decisions
One account, all the products.
Existing marketplaces stop after a user enters and selects a third-party product. Crediverso owned the entire value chain: product application, transaction, cross-product transactions through the same account, and discovery of new products through the same identity. We built primitives in Figma around this multi-product structure so the same patterns served any new partner without redesign.
Family as a first-class primitive.
Family Cards turned household structure into a product object. Each family member gets a card. Funds move between cards. The primary user (Juan, our principal avatar) sees his account and the family group at the same altitude on his home screen. Family Cards became a primitive that other partner-product surfaces inherited as the app grew.
The nav bar tradeoff.
A central V1 debate was whether to split primary and family accounts across separate tabs or combine them on a single dashboard. We ran SWOT comparisons for both:
- Split: clearer mental model per context, lower screen density, more taps to move money
- Combined: denser home screen, more layout complexity, fewer taps for the primary "move money" action
We chose combined. The product is family-first by identity, and splitting it diluted the thesis. Simpler UX complexity at the cost of more density was the right tradeoff. The Move Money flow became a dedicated action surface within the combined Accounts tab.
What Shipped
V1 of the Crediverso mobile app launched in November 2022 after 22 months of design and development.
- Usability testing with 50+ participants validated the primary flows and reduced primary-flow bounce rate by 15%
- Pre-launch organic growth from A/B-tested messaging grew the channel from 700 to 2,100 followers (125%) before the iOS App Store release
- Shipped on iOS with full bilingual coverage across every flow
Reflections
The nav-bar decision is the one I think about most. Two equally defensible SWOTs led to a non-obvious choice that only resolved once we put the product thesis (family-first identity) in front of the screen-density question. The pattern carries forward: when SWOT comparisons resolve evenly, the tiebreaker is rarely "best UX," it's "which option reinforces the product's identity."
Bilingual is also worth a second pass. Treating Spanish as a translation layer would have shipped a product that worked in two languages but felt designed in one. Treating bilingual as a core flow requirement, not a language switch, shaped how every screen's information hierarchy was built. That principle generalizes to any product serving a multi-context audience.
Notes
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, confidential information has been omitted or obfuscated. All views are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Crediverso.
