At Velo, I led the UX/UI for "HibanaPay," an Open Banking solution designed to slash transaction fees for businesses. Working directly under the vision of Chairman & CEO John Partridge (former President of Visa), We were tasked with delivering a payment ecosystem that met world-class financial standards. My role extended beyond product design; I championed a technical and cultural transformation that reduced project delivery timelines from one year to just three months.
Small businesses were losing significant revenue to transaction fees from providers like Square. We identified an opportunity to utilise Open Banking to facilitate direct bank-to-bank payments via QR codes. The challenge was creating a B2B interface that made generating and managing these QR codes as simple as a card terminal, while ensuring the consumer experience was frictionless.
Technical Strategy
Bridging the gap: From Figma Variables to Git Repositories.
To execute this vision at speed, we needed to eliminate the manual "translation loss" between design and code. I developed a custom plugin that acted as a token converter, transforming Figma variables directly into Style Dictionary format. This data was then published to our Git capability, triggering automated updates. This "design-to-code" token pipeline alongside the component library I built for the team, ensured absolute parity and accelerated development from an expected 12 month timeline to only 3 months.
Team Transformation
Moving from siloed execution to collaborative maturity.
When I joined, the design function was fragmented, with individuals working in isolation. I implemented standardised workflows, including robust Figma templates and weekly design critiques. This shift fostered a culture of shared ownership and constructive feedback, significantly raising the team's UX maturity and cross-functional visibility. New projects gained improved consistency and standards, ensuring multiple views and ideas where explored to reach the best solution for the problems at hand.
HibanaPay Solution
A seamless QR ecosystem for merchants and customers.
We delivered HibanaPay, a robust platform allowing businesses to generate payment QR codes instantly. By leveraging Open Banking APIs, we bypassed traditional card networks, offering merchants drastically reduced fees. The UI focused on clarity and speed, allowing business owners to request money and track incoming payments in real-time without complex hardware.
The combination of the new token system and collaborative workflows slashed our project timelines from 12 months to 3 months. This efficiency allowed us to bring HibanaPay to market faster, providing businesses with a viable, cost-saving alternative to traditional payment processors. The team developed our MVP ahead of schedule which allowed us to gather feedback from customers and start iterating on improvements.