Almond Fintech

TL;DR

Role-Aware Cross-Border Fintech Workflows

I redesigned a cross-border fintech platform for clients, agents, and administrators, creating role-specific workflows that balanced consumer trust, agent speed, and administrative control.

Sending money across borders shouldn't require a finance degree

Almond Fintech came to me with a platform built around an important mission — cross-border transfers and credit tools for underserved users — but a user journey that was getting in its own way.

I joined a team of four designers as UX/UI lead on a five-month engagement to identify where the experience was breaking down and redesign it from the ground up for three distinct user types: clients, agents, and administrators.

One platform was trying to serve three completely different mental models at once

Clients, agents, and administrators all used the same interface but had fundamentally different goals and technical comfort levels.

A client sending a first international transfer needed simplicity and trust signals. An agent processing multiple transactions needed speed and batch visibility. An administrator needed control and auditability.

The existing journey was designed for none of them specifically — which meant it worked poorly for all three.

User interviews confirmed that drop-off was highest at the points where the platform forced all three user types through the same decision flow.

I helped design three distinct experiences inside one coherent system

The strategic direction was role-aware UI — the interface would adapt its information density and task priority based on who was logged in, without requiring three separate products.

I excluded a full design system rebuild from scope deliberately: with five months and a parallel development handoff, building new components from scratch would have delayed the flows that actually needed to ship.

We worked in Figma with a shared component library, running weekly reviews with the project manager to keep stakeholder alignment tight.

The biggest constraint came mid-project when stakeholders redirected the team from mobile-first to desktop-first — a pivot that required us to restructure several flows we had already refined.

The mobile-to-desktop pivot forced better decisions than the original brief would have

When stakeholders shifted priorities to desktop mid-project, the instinct was to treat it as a setback.

Instead, it exposed a real gap: our mobile-first flows had been optimizing for simplicity at the cost of the power features agents and admins needed.

The desktop canvas gave us room to surface those features without cluttering the client experience. We rebuilt the transaction and reporting flows for desktop first, then adapted back to mobile — which produced a more honest hierarchy than our original approach.

The redesign created a clearer direction for three distinct financial workflows

I delivered redesigned flows for clients, agents, and administrators, along with desktop-first and mobile-adapted UI direction for the most important transaction and reporting journeys. The work was handed off to the client team as the engagement concluded.

Because the contract ended before I had access to implementation or analytics, I was not able to independently verify launch status or post-launch product metrics. The project reinforced the value of designing for distinct user mental models rather than forcing every user through a single workflow.

What this project taught me about designing for users you can't assume

The mobile-to-desktop pivot was the best thing that happened to this project. Constraints that feel like blockers often expose assumptions worth challenging.

Role-aware design sounds obvious in hindsight, but most fintech platforms skip it — they build for the average user and frustrate everyone else.

I would push earlier for role-specific usability testing rather than testing with a general user group. Our research was strong, but a dedicated agent-testing session would have caught the batch-processing gaps sooner.

If I had continued with the team, I would have instrumented the transfer and onboarding flows to understand which changes most affected completion and retention.