Crypto Banking

Xapo is a dual-licensed banking and Virtual Asset Service Provider that offers a global, 100% mobile, banking and asset management service that enables customers to seamlessly transact in both fiat and Bitcoin currencies.

Xapo uses its dual licences to give customers the means to protect their savings against market, geopolitical and economic instability, wherever they are. With fully remote teams, operating in more than 50 countries around the world, the bank is working to increase the accessibility of highly stable and reliable banking services — especially for customers in emerging markets.

Having been initially founded as a Bitcoin Custodian in 2014, the company decided to relaunch in 2021 as a fully licensed bank to help it achieve both its social and financial goals.

Scaling from Bitcoin vault to global bank. Building a faster, future-ready digital bank.

This project has 3 streams that demonstrate my leadership, influence, and practitioner skills.

1, leadership in assessing maturity, forming and hiring a team

2, influence to change ways of working within the organization

3, practitioner skills creating a new onboarding experience

Role 1: establish where Xapo is at in design maturity and then write job descriptions and interview an entirely new team of UX and UI designers for them, acting as interim head of design.

Once I had hired a team it was then my goal to align ways of working between design and development, a historically messy relationship that had caused many problems and blame culture, where designers did not feel valued as developers built what they believed to be the best or easiest code solution regardless of the designer’s input and plan based on user and market research.

Role 2: Influencing ways of working

I ran a series of workshops to introduce the ‘thin slice’ approach to teams so that it would improve the working relationship between design and development but also speed up their time to market with features and remove the “Big Bang” release style they had previously been working to. I ran a two-day hackathon where teams could iterate the vision of the app and made quick proof of concept builds to show technical feasibility to the wider business. Everyone was very excited by this and it was prioritized in the roadmap and adopted as a new way of working across all pods.

Role 3: Lead UX designer of the onboarding team

My final task was to be the product/UX designer within the pod that was responsible for the onboarding experience of the bank. This included applying for an account/membership as well as setting up the app for existing customers. This application for an account meant that a lot of security and compliance had to be considered to meet regulatory requirements e.g. FSCI.

This involved working with third-party teams on the identity verification section of the process, which had an astronomically high failure rate due to poor UX and onscreen prompts and instructions for the user. I worked with both the third-party and bank’s development teams to improve this and reduce the failure rate significantly, by displaying messages related to specific error codes in plain English so that users could make corrections rather than be rejected and have to complete the entire process again from scratch.

I also led the implementation of a new design system that synced between designers and developers after multiple different instances of the same component started to cause confusion and inconsistency between prototypes and build versions.

Finally, I paired with the bank’s UX researcher to run customer interviews and understand wants, needs, and pain points that were logged and collated in Dovetail before being fed back into teams for product owners to assess their feature roadmaps and amend as appropriate, including bug fixes.