Crafting compelling retail finance solutions for UK banks and lenders
Divido, a UK-based fintech company, is revolutionising retail finance with its whitelabel embedded lending technology. Unlike competitors such as Klarna, Divido doesn't directly provide credit. Instead, it operates as a marketplace where lenders compete to provide the most suitable credit options. To address this dynamic market, Divido has developed a robust technology and product stack, facilitating lenders in offering retail finance solutions swiftly, and empowering merchants with a feasible path to providing finance across various markets.
In April 2023, I joined Divido as their first full-time product design hire. Initially, I joined the Merchant Squad to enhance their Merchant Platform offering with additional functionality. I swiftly transitioned into the role of Lead Product Designer, overseeing the entire product lifecycle of multiple offerings. Collaborating closely with product strategists, technical leads, engineering teams, and marketing, I facilitated the delivery of more scalable and flexible customer experiences.
Divido’s commercial team needed a faster, more scalable way to demo our retail finance solution to prospective merchant and lender partners. At the time, setting up a branded demo environment was a highly manual process involving multiple teams — often taking 2–3 weeks to deliver a single, static experience.
This slowed down sales cycles, created internal inefficiencies, and made it harder for prospects to grasp the platform’s value first-hand.
Key business challenges:
- Sales were delayed due to lengthy demo setup times.
- The manual approach wasn’t sustainable as the company scaled.
- Commercial teams lacked tools to independently configure or tailor demo journeys.
- Test accounts generated support tickets, distracting technical teams from higher-priority issues.
Project objectives:
- Reduce the time and effort needed to provision demo accounts.
- Enable non-technical teams to showcase the platform independently.
- Improve the onboarding experience for trial users.
- Provide a framework that could be extended into the core platform.
Creating the Application Toolkit required a multi-layered, collaborative approach. My focus spanned research, service design, and systems thinking — ensuring the solution was usable, scalable, and aligned with real workflows. The project was delivered iteratively alongside engineering.
To uncover the root causes of friction in the sales and onboarding experience, I conducted qualitative research with internal stakeholders across sales, onboarding, and support. Through interviews and observational research, I identified several recurring challenges:
- Inconsistent setup and delivery of product demos
- Over-reliance on engineering for test account creation
- Friction during the onboarding of trial users
With these insights in hand, I worked closely with product and engineering leads to translate findings into a structured set of user stories and jobs to be done. These artefacts helped us map specific pain points to key features, functions, and capabilities — forming the foundation for backlog planning and roadmap definition.
To support prioritisation and estimation, I layered in MoSCoW ratings, effort estimates, and value scoring. This approach ensured the most critical and impactful aspects of the MVP were clearly identified, technically feasible, and aligned with team capacity and strategic goals.
To enable flexibility and reuse, I audited the platform’s existing customer journeys and components. This informed a modular structure that allowed commercial teams to assemble demo flows using configurable building blocks — including finance application forms, checkout processes, and partner-branded pages.
Using Figma, I developed interactive prototypes to test flow logic, configurability, and UI clarity. Key features included:
- Branded journeys
- Feature toggles
- Preview modes to simulate live customer experiences
These prototypes were shared with internal users in rapid feedback loops, allowing early validation and refinement of edge cases.
In parallel, I established a shared Figma design system built on our component library and compliant with WCAG 2.2 AA standards. This accelerated iteration, ensured accessibility, and improved collaboration with engineers.
The design system also became a foundation for future tooling — supporting consistency across onboarding, product configuration, and internal admin experiences.
I worked closely with engineering to deliver the toolkit in phased MVP releases. Each iteration was shaped by internal testing and feedback, with features prioritised based on impact and usability.
This approach helped us:
- Resolve technical dependencies early
- Stay responsive to team needs
- Improve continuously as adoption grew
The Application Toolkit allowed commercial teams to build fully branded demo experiences in under 2 days — a process that previously took 2–3 weeks. With support for merchant and lender branding, custom messaging, and feature toggles, prospects could interact with realistic product journeys from day one.
Key capabilities included:
- Simulated checkout and finance application flows
- Guided setup of channels and lending products
- Clear, hands-on onboarding experiences for new users
Beyond solving demo pain points, the toolkit laid important foundations for the wider product ecosystem:
- A shared, WCAG-compliant design system
- Configurable components used across onboarding and admin tools
- Improved scalability and UX consistency throughout the platform
The result was a far more intuitive and empowering experience for both internal teams and external partners. Demo setup time was reduced by 90%—from 2–3 weeks to under 2 days—freeing up valuable time for the design and engineering teams and giving the sales team much greater autonomy. The toolkit’s guided onboarding flows also helped prospective merchant and lender partners form clearer mental models of the platform, leading to stronger engagement during early sales conversations.
We saw a significant drop in support ticket volume from test accounts, which in turn allowed our technical support teams to prioritise higher-value issues rather than repetitive setup queries. Additionally, the introduction of a shared design system and component libraries increased efficiency across design and development, laying a scalable foundation for future product enhancements.
Overall, the toolkit didn’t just solve a demo problem—it elevated the broader partner experience while improving operational efficiency across the business.
With our new toolkit product, we can now provide prospective customers a branded demo-product in less than 2 days. This would usually take around 3 weeks before.
Time for new merchants to setup their first channel and finance plan is less than 1 hour with huge reduction in customer service support requests.
This project wasn’t just about creating a better way to build demo environments—it was about empowering teams, reducing friction for partners, and laying a foundation for scalable design across the platform. By taking a user-centred approach and grounding the solution in real operational workflows, we created a toolkit that improved internal efficiency, boosted partner engagement, and reduced support overhead. It became a launchpad not just for better demos, but for a stronger, more intuitive product ecosystem.
Service mapping is critical for aligning internal tools to real workflows — without it, it’s easy to solve the wrong problem.
Design systems unlock scale — especially when the toolkit output becomes foundational for wider platform UX.
Small enhancements (like onboarding tasks) can have outsized effects — by supporting user momentum and reducing the learning curve.
Include real partners earlier in testing to ensure assumptions held true beyond internal users.
Refine the configuration UX: earlier iterations were too flexible; a more opinionated UI would improve clarity and reduce error.
Embed analytics from day one to better understand how the toolkit impacted sales conversion and onboarding behaviour over time.
