Banking · Payments · Payroll · Digital assets · B2B
Unified business finance platform
COMPANY
Flyfish
ROLE
Lead Product Designer
EXPERTISE
UX/UI Design
YEAR
2023
Read
5 mins
Project Description
Flyfish is a business finance platform unifying banking, payments, payroll, and digital asset management into one system. I joined as product designer to shape the platform's UX direction end-to-end — from early strategy and research through to a scalable SaaS and mobile design system — working closely with stakeholders and engineering to make that complexity usable for businesses operating across multiple providers and jurisdictions.
Challenge
The business opportunity was already clear to stakeholders. The harder problem was making that complexity feel intuitive and trustworthy for businesses operating across multiple financial providers and jurisdictions — while balancing business ambition, user needs, and engineering constraints throughout.
Research
Discovery combined structured workshops, competitive analysis, and flow mapping. I benchmarked established fintech products — Revolut, Stripe, Wise, and several enterprise financial systems — to understand how mature platforms handle trust, information hierarchy, transaction visibility, permissions, and multi-account navigation. The goal wasn't visual inspiration; it was identifying interaction patterns that could simplify genuinely complex financial workflows.
Findings shaped the direction from there: users needed clarity more than feature density, trust was driven more by interface behaviour than branding, and dense dashboards needed to give way to progressive disclosure.
Persona
Flyfish didn't split into user personas — it split by role. Employers and employees needed fundamentally different levels of access and control within the same financial ecosystem, which shaped permissions, onboarding, and reporting from early on.
Process
Planning
Discovery started with structured workshops — some remote, some in person in Paphos — working directly with stakeholders and the product manager to align business objectives, user needs, and technical feasibility before any screens were drawn. Prioritisation was a constant balancing act between three competing forces: business ambition, user expectations, and engineering feasibility. Continuous feedback loops with stakeholders, developers, and users kept scope grounded in what was actually buildable within the MVP timeline, rather than what looked good on a roadmap.
User Flow
Employers and employees needed fundamentally different levels of access and control within the same financial ecosystem, so flows were mapped by role rather than as one generic journey. Because the platform tied together many interconnected financial services, a change in one flow — onboarding, permissions, reporting, transactions — could ripple into others. Mapping with that interdependency in mind, and building reusable patterns early, kept the product consistent as it expanded.
Design thinking
The core tension was security versus usability: financial operations needed secure authentication and sensitive transaction handling without adding friction. Dense dashboards were the default risk in a product with this much operational data, so the direction shifted toward progressive disclosure — surfacing complexity only when it was needed, rather than all at once. Dashboard architecture and component structure were explored in parallel, since each kept reshaping the other.
Implementation
Discovery and flow work fed into a component system built for reuse across the platform, then into high-fidelity interface design. Regular stakeholder presentations kept direction validated along the way rather than saved for one big reveal — important given how much was still being negotiated between business, user, and engineering constraints. That process supported delivering the MVP within the planned timeline.
Solution
Five things came directly out of research and anchored decisions from there: clarity mattered more than feature density; trust was shaped by how the interface behaved, not by branding; visibility and transparency reduced operational anxiety; security needed to feel integrated into the flow rather than bolted on top; and complexity called for progressive disclosure instead of dense, all-at-once dashboards. Security versus usability was the throughline — authentication and sensitive transaction handling had to hold up without adding friction to routine tasks.
Visual design and Design principles
Dashboard architecture and component structure were explored in parallel, since decisions in one kept reshaping the other. High-fidelity interfaces followed, refined through regular stakeholder presentations rather than a single final reveal.
Design system
Worth being precise here rather than overstating it: the visual foundation — tone, brand direction (modern, trustworthy, secure, globally accessible) — was provided by stakeholders early on, not originated by me. What I built on top of it was the operational layer: a reusable component system covering dashboards, forms, permissions, and transactional patterns, built to hold up as the platform scaled across desktop and mobile.
Outcomes
Flyfish's MVP shipped within the planned timeline. What launched wasn't just a set of screens but a scalable product system — component structure and interaction patterns built to expand as the platform grew, spanning banking, payments, payroll, and digital asset workflows in one experience across desktop and mobile.
Worth being upfront about a limit here: this was a 3-month consultancy engagement ending at MVP delivery, so I don't have visibility into what happened after launch — adoption, business impact, how it performed. Result can honestly say what shipped and what it was built to support going forward. It can't claim outcomes I wasn't there to see. That's a more credible Result section than a vague "successfully launched" line, and it's still a real answer to "so what happened."
Reflection
Flyfish was ultimately about simplification — not of the underlying technology, but of how users experienced financial complexity. Bringing banking, payments, payroll, and digital assets into one coherent product meant constant negotiation between business ambition, user needs, and engineering constraints, and required systems thinking as much as interface design. The bigger lesson: for a product this complex, strong collaboration across design, product, and engineering is often what determines whether it reaches launch at all — not any single design decision.