RakbankMobile banking redesign for three user types

Context

3.2 App Store stars. 15 independent product teams shipping features with their own patterns. Inconsistency was the visible symptom — the real problem was cognitive. Banking apps are used in moments of anxiety. Checking a suspicious transaction is a different mental state from paying a bill. The app wasn't designed for that difference.

Challenge

Fixing screens without shared infrastructure meant new inconsistencies in the next sprint. The app served retail customers, SME owners, and internal relationship managers through overlapping surfaces — each with fundamentally different needs that couldn't be solved with separate app variants.

My role

I owned UX direction, information hierarchy, persona differentiation, and visual language across iOS and Android. I made the case to build the token architecture before touching any screens.

What I changed

• Audited every major flow across all 15 teams before touching screens. The finding: inconsistency was a systems problem. Built the token layer first so the brief became a full digital transformation.
• Rejected persona-specific app variants. One visual language, differentiated through information hierarchy. Retail: speed and balance visibility. SME: multi-account controls. RM: data density and workflow support. Building variants would have tripled maintenance overhead.
• Designed for speed-of-recognition. Banking is used in moments of anxiety — the metric that mattered was time-to-understanding, not time-on-screen. Suspicious transaction answer visible on first screen (was buried 2 taps in).

Outcome

App Store rating: 3.2 to 4.6. Task completion: +34%. Support calls: -28%. 180K+ active users.