Early-stage fintech apps
Strong engineering, no in-house onboarding UX. Budgeting apps, currency exchange, wallets, finance trackers, insurance.
Fewer users lost in onboarding for early-stage fintech apps.
If your signup numbers look fine but activation doesn't. I help fintech founders and product teams find exactly where users drop off, why, and what to change first.
20 minutes, no deck. I only do an audit if I'm sure it pays for itself in six months.
Latest teardown
ZEN.com: five before/after fixes
Clients
I work with builders who ship fast and institutions that cannot fail
Two kinds of companies come to me. They share one problem: their users vanish before the first real transaction.
Financial institutions and regulated products
Where compliance constraints shape the flow.
Problems
What usually goes wrong before the first transaction
The signup numbers look healthy. The activation numbers tell a different story. This is where the money leaks.
Ghost accounts
Users sign up but never activate. The signup rate looks healthy, the first-transaction rate doesn't.
Silent killers
Dead buttons, errors with no explanation, no way to go back, wrong currency visible. Basic usability that silently kills accounts.
KYC abandonment
40–60% abandonment is normal in identity verification, and most teams treat it as untouchable because “compliance”.
Missing moment
The aha moment isn't marked. The most valuable second in the flow passes with nothing to reinforce it.
How I help
01
02
03
Three things you get, every time
Know exactly where users leave, and why
I go through your onboarding the way a real user does, screen by screen, and map every friction point against behavioural models. You get a prioritised list of what's breaking, with the reasoning attached.
Get testable hypotheses
Every recommendation comes as “I believe changing X will cause Y, because Z” with the behavioural mechanism and the metric it should move. Your team can argue with it, prioritise it by ICE, and ship it. Nothing lands in your backlog that can't be measured.
Redesigned screens your developers can build
The critical moments come back as designed screens in Figma, not annotations on a screenshot. I redesign the points that decide how users remember the whole experience.
Projects
Selected work
Wise
Case studyA global payments platform with a very good product, which loses a lot of new users every month.
The problem
- High drop-off during onboarding and a low First-Transaction Rate indicate that users are disengaging prematurely, failing to finalise their first transfer.
- Wise is a founder-led company, so the greatest emotional burden falls on the CEO. This leads to frustration, more meetings and possible chaos within the product team.
My role
As a product designer with an economic background, I know how to engineer trust and engagement in finances.
Plan
- Discovery meeting.
- Behavioral, data and heuristic analysis: every issue marked, weighted, and ordered by impact.
- Report PDF, Hi-Fi redesigned screens of recommendations and post-audit consulting to ensure these changes are implemented.
If nothing changes
Continued waste of marketing budget acquiring users who never complete their first transaction. Loss of market leadership to competitors who more quickly understand and address their customers' emotional barriers.
Target outcome
A minimum 10% increase in onboarding conversion and a 30% reduction in time-to-value for the first transfer.
Behavioural flow analysis
ZEN.com
Case studyA European fintech offering accounts, cards and payments, which asks new users to pick a paid plan before they have seen what the product actually does for them.
The problem
- Paid plans convert on paper, but users cancel within the first months. The pressure to hit paid-conversion targets pushes the product team toward tactics that buy the sale and lose the customer.
- Nobody owns the fallout, growth and product blame each other's metrics, and the founders are left explaining churn they can't trace back to a single decision.
My role
As a product designer with an economic background, I know how to engineer trust and engagement in finances.
Plan
- Discovery meeting.
- Behavioral, data and heuristic analysis: every issue marked, weighted, and ordered by impact.
- Report PDF, Hi-Fi redesigned screens of recommendations and post-audit consulting to ensure these changes are implemented.
If nothing changes
Paid conversions bought with dark patterns that cancel in month two. Inflated signup numbers, deteriorating retention, and a brand that users learn to distrust exactly where trust matters most: their money.
Target outcome
Five before/after fixes: equal visual weight across plans, all fees upfront, confirmshaming removed, default bias removed, and concrete benefits shown per plan. Resulting in roughly 15% higher user retention on paid plans.
Plan selection, before and after
Approach
How we work together
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01
Discovery call
A conversation where you show me your funnel and tell me where users disappear. I ask what compliance won't let you change and who you're benchmarked against. No prep needed on your side.
Want a quick onboarding audit? Book a call -
02
Behavioural, data and heuristic analysis
I go through your onboarding screen by screen: behavioural psychology, your analytics, and heuristic review. Every issue gets marked, weighted by impact, and ordered by what to fix first. You get a priority list, not a pile of observations.
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03
Report, redesigned screens, and support until it ships
A PDF report with findings, hi-fi screens showing exactly what the fix looks like, and post-audit consulting, so the recommendations actually get implemented instead of sitting in a Notion doc.
About
I help early-stage fintech teams fix the part of the product where users quietly disappear: onboarding
I've taken apart the onboarding flows of big enterprises like Wise and ZEN.com, screen by screen, scored, redesigned. Just one audit at a time, done entirely by me.
My background is economics, not visual design, which is why I focus on drop-off, time-to-value and cost per activated user rather than spacing.
Contact
Let's look at your onboarding together
- I tell you straight whether this is worth a paid audit, or a fix your team can ship next week without me.
- I only audit if I'm sure it pays for itself in six months.
Fixed fee per project. A full 3-week onboarding audit sprint runs roughly €2,000–7,500 depending on research depth. Early-stage products that need the basics fixed first can start with a smaller UX Health Check.
Probably, and I'll say so on the call. Early products usually don't need conversion tuning. They need showstoppers removed: dead buttons, silent errors, no way to go back. That's a smaller, cheaper piece of work, and it's the honest starting point.
No. Analytics make the work sharper. If you have Amplitude, Mixpanel or GA4, I'll use it. Without it, the audit runs on heuristics, behavioural analysis and your flow itself, and one of the deliverables is telling you which events to start tracking.
Yes: compliance dictates what you must collect, almost never how you ask for it. Order, framing, error handling, what you explain before the ID scan: that's where the KYC drop-off actually lives, and none of it requires touching the legal requirement.
I sell a diagnosis and a testable plan, not a guaranteed conversion number. Anyone promising the latter is guessing. Every hypothesis is written so you can measure it and kill it if it doesn't hold. If a change doesn't move the metric, you've eliminated it cheaply, which is the point.