The social side of payments.
Verse / Fintech / B2C
Verse is a payments app designed for Gen Z, aiming to bring a social dimension to banking that aligns with how younger generations manage money.
The Story —
Establishing Product Design Foundations.
I joined Verse in January 2022 to build and lead the Design team, establishing product design foundations and practices within the organisation. The team seamlessly integrated into squads, working across all phases—from early exploration to implementation and final QA. The research was centralised, ensuring continuous user insights informed both the product team and the broader organisation.
Although redesigning the application was one of Verse’s goals, the company lacked a Design System. As a result, designers and developers had to start from scratch every sprint, leading to inconsistencies in design and inefficient, fragmented code across the application.
Recognising this challenge, we made it a priority to establish a Design System. Working closely with the Design and Front-End teams, we identified, streamlined, and standardised all existing components, ensuring consistency across key screens and processes.
We applied the same approach to copy and illustrations, eliminating inconsistencies to create a more cohesive and user-friendly experience. Thanks to a tremendous team effort, we accomplished this goal in less than two months.
The implementation not only enhanced consistency across the product but also significantly reduced development time. At the same time, we embedded system maintenance as a fundamental step in the design process, ensuring long-term scalability and efficiency.
Giving users a seat at the table.
When I joined Verse, I was impressed by how easily we could access data and connect with our customers. However, despite having valuable sources of information, the data was neither centralised nor effectively channelled, limiting its impact on the company’s decision-making.
With limited resources, we took a structured approach by distributing responsibilities across the team and consolidating insights in a bi-weekly ceremony called Product4Users. In this session:
The Product Manager presented an analysis of usage data from Looker and GA.
The Researcher shared findings from interviews with Ambassadors, insights from our Discord community, and user testing results.
A User Happiness lead, assigned to each squad, reported the most pressing user issues and complaints.
By integrating these perspectives, we ensured that user feedback directly influenced product decisions, fostering a data-driven and user-centric approach.
All insights were documented and classified as pills in a new research repository, bugs in our developers’ backlog or new opportunities within the ideas bank.
In parallel, we launched a customised version of the NPS, focusing mainly on all aspects of the application related to Design (ease of use, appearance, trust and loyalty) and making more detailed divisions of the information (by functionality, by type of user, by country, …) on which we could later go deeper with qualitative interventions.
Design vs. Compliance.
One of the biggest challenges in fintech is striking the right balance between a seamless user experience and strict regulatory compliance. Achieving this requires patience, creativity, and a logical approach.
Since Verse was originally launched as a simple payment app before the introduction of PSD2, we faced significant regulatory challenges over time. However, we successfully implemented key compliance measures, including 3DS, two-factor authentication (2FA), and Strong Customer Authentication (SCA), with a particular focus on customer identification.
Recognizing the impact of compliance on user onboarding, we worked tirelessly to design a streamlined process that could be completed in stages. This approach prevented friction during a user’s first interaction, allowing them to explore the app’s value while engagement was still high.
From our first (rushed) IDV implementation—where the company’s license was at stake—to today, we have continuously optimized the flow, increasing the completion rate by 20% and significantly improving the onboarding experience.
Much more than payments.
During my time at Verse, the product evolved from a simple payment app into a streamlined banking solution with a compelling value proposition that attracted more customers. We introduced advanced payment options, developed a rewards system to drive card usage, implemented smart savings rules, improved group balance management, and expanded the events feature to unlock new monetisation opportunities.
Increasing inflows with Auto-Add Money
Before making any purchase with the VerseCard, users had to manually add funds to the app—a frustrating and inconvenient process. On average, a VerseCard user topped up their balance seven times per month. This friction also led to frequent payment failures, with ~20% of VerseCard transactions and ~60% of direct debits being declined due to insufficient funds.
Our goal was to increase inflows per MTU (monthly transacting user) by reducing the friction of adding money to Verse.
The initial implementation didn’t yield the results we expected, so we pivoted. Instead of allowing users to set deposits by fixed amounts, we introduced an option to schedule automatic top-ups based on frequency.
This adjustment led to a €40 average increase in money-in per user and boosted the number of monthly top-ups by over 30%—significantly improving the overall experience and financial engagement.
Initiative #1 —
Enhancing the payment experience with Scheduled Payments
Analysing the most common group names in Verse—such as Netflix and Spotify—revealed that many users rely on the app for sharing recurring expenses. Additionally, data showed that after deposits, P2P transactions were the most frequent activity in the app, making this feature a key area for improvement.
Our goal was to enhance the P2P experience by enabling users to schedule payments and set up recurring transfers (e.g., weekly or monthly). This would help drive higher MTU (monthly transacting users) engagement and improve retention.
We designed a seamless, low-friction flow integrated into the existing P2P process. Three months after launch, the feature achieved a 22% adoption rate—exceeding our KPI by 10%—and significantly contributed to increasing the average balance users added to Verse.
Initiative #2 —
Boosting the VerseCard with Cashback
With 70% of users already engaging with cashback programs in other apps, we needed to design a rewards system that would create stickiness for the VerseCard.
Our goal was to increase MTU retention while addressing the design challenge of clearly communicating where, how, and how much users needed to spend to unlock their rewards.
We improved the visibility of participating merchants and enhanced the in-app progress tracking for each reward. Additionally, we worked closely with the Marketing team to launch campaigns and generate excitement around partnered brands.
As a result, user retention within the cashback program increased by 20%, reinforcing engagement and driving more transactions through the VerseCard.
Initiative #3 —
Initiative #4 —
Events: Spending money is better with friends
From the start, Events was one of the most popular social features in the Verse app, especially during the COVID era. Despite its high monetization potential, usage was steadily declining. Users struggled to find the feature, and those who did often didn’t understand how to use it.
We set out to increase the visibility of Events and improve its architecture and content presentation to drive engagement, grow the number of MTUs, and unlock monetisation opportunities.
In just six months, revenue exceeded projections by 12%, with 34% of all created events being monetised. Additionally, the number of MTUs participating in monetised events skyrocketed—70% higher than our initial KPI—proving the feature’s renewed value and potential.
Social Banking, Gen-Z and their circles
Alongside product improvements, we launched a research initiative focused on Generation Z and their financial behaviours to better align our offerings with their needs.
We discovered that when it comes to money, Gen Z is heavily influenced by their parents, which meant that some of the insights weren’t as distinct from older generations as we had initially expected. However, the research still provided valuable takeaways, including:
Initiative #5 — Hands On
Turning Insights into Action
We translated our findings into practical product improvements to better serve Gen Z’s needs:
Simplifying savings and rewards: We introduced more convenient savings options and restructured the rewards system. Additionally, we made it easier for users to request money from friends without feeling awkward.
Building trust through design and communication: We conducted an in-depth review of all app copy and worked closely with users to identify and address trust blackspots in the experience.
Exploring "circles of trust": I personally led design explorations on how to bring the Verse experience closer to WhatsApp than Revolut, emphasizing familiarity and social connections in the app’s interactions.
Cashify —
Preparing for the transition to CashApp.
In 2020, Verse was acquired by Block (formerly Square) to use it as a foundation to launch CashApp in Europe. By 2023, the focus shifted from developing new features to designing a seamless migration strategy for users.
Since both applications shared similar functionalities, we collaborated with the CashApp Design team in New York to create an intermediate visual style—essentially a "blue CashApp"—aligned with CashApp’s new navigation architecture.
To support this transition, we:
Developed a new branch of Mooncake (CashApp’s Design System) to build and adapt component variants.
Created high-fidelity prototypes to test and validate key hypotheses with users about the most significant changes.
We named this initiative Cashify and implemented the updates in phases, gradually aligning Verse with CashApp. However, as the project progressed, the technical complexity of the migration led to a shift in the company’s overall strategy, ultimately putting the transition on hold.
Lessons Learned —
Embracing a Product-Centric Culture.
The transition from a large, commercial-driven company like Bankinter, with multiple products and a sales-oriented approach, to a fast-paced startup like Verse, focused on a single application and a product-led strategy, was challenging at first.
However, over time, I immersed myself in a data-driven product culture, where every decision—including design choices—was backed by insights. Seeing the team, the product, and our impact on key KPIs grow quarter after quarter has been incredibly rewarding.
Beyond the numbers, one of the most valuable aspects of my time at Verse has been working with a globally distributed team, collaborating asynchronously yet seamlessly. This experience has pushed me to grow in new ways, reinforcing the power of well-structured remote work and a strong, results-driven culture.
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