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.
During my time at Divido, I have spearheaded design initiatives, leading and owning projects across their entire lifecycle, culminating in the successful launch of multiple new features and products. By facilitating workshops with stakeholders, I've championed collaboration to define and implement innovative solutions to complex challenges, ensuring alignment with user needs at each step.
In close partnership with product managers, I've played a pivotal role in shaping and evolving product roadmaps, while collaborating closely with engineers to build, iterate on, and ship ideas. Leveraging high-level requirements, I've translated them into intuitive and elegant user journeys, embodying a user-centric approach throughout the process.
Moreover, I've demonstrated agility in rapidly producing visual concepts and functional prototypes, applying pixel-perfect attention to detail where necessary. Working holistically across multiple platforms, I've fostered coherence in experiences while consistently solving problems.
One of my significant contributions has been establishing Divido's own design system, component library, and toolkit. This initiative has not only enhanced responsiveness, flexibility, and scalability but has also ensured consistency across all products and solutions. Furthermore, with a design system acting as a single source of truth for our visual language and UI/UX patterns, we are able to create fully themed and styled prototypes to test new functionality quicker, and get them to market more efficiently. Designed with white-labelling in mind, the core design system can seamlessly adapt to meet the unique needs of our lending and merchant partner brands.
With a dedicated design system, I’ve demonstrated agility in rapidly producing visual concepts and functional prototypes, applying pixel-perfect attention to detail where necessary.
This has enabled us to trial ideas and test new functionality quicker than ever before. By testing new functionality across our products via interactive prototypes, we can prioritise development effort more effectively and concentrate on delivering continued value where it matters, without the expensive technical overheads
I have played a pivotal role in developing our ‘Application Toolkit' product, a new initiative that showcases our end-to-end consumer retail finance application journey to prospective lending and merchant partners. It highlights the flexibility and modularity of our service, from finance calculator customisation to seamless integration with open banking and identification services.
In order to get Merchant’s onboarded quicker and retail finance ready, we explored ways to help them complete core tasks such as creating their first channel and assigning a finance plan. Using a ‘Quick task’ approach on the Merchant Portal dashboard, we significantly improved initial set up time with a self-serve set up guide
My experience with this fintech startup has empowered me to influence the company's user-centric design ethos and foster improved collaboration among teams, resulting in more intuitive, responsive, and accessible products. Additionally, I've played a pivotal role in developing one of the company's newest flagship features, contributing significantly to its continued success and growth in the retail finance sector.
- Work with product and tech teams to help define roadmap and feature requirements
- Product design workshops communicating high-level design strategies
- Visual concepts, wireframes and high-fidelity prototypes (Figma + Miro)
- Creation of an all-new Design System and component library (Figma)
- Contribute to a positive product design team culture
- Helped to improve ways of working between design and development