We sat down for an in-depth interview with Plata Design Director Alexander Syrov and asked him how, in just four years, the bank went from its first product screens to becoming one of the country’s leading digital banks.

This interview is part of a larger research project, “The Impact of Design on Fintech Growth,” by MSHD, a design studio. Our goal is to understand how design contributes to business growth and identify the best practices that help companies build strong products and brands.

1. Before Plata

Tell us about your path into design.

It started back when I was a student. I was studying computer science at BNTU in Minsk while also getting into graphic design. At some point, I realized that design was what I wanted to pursue professionally. I switched to a part-time degree program and moved to Moscow.

My first job there was at an advertising agency. Then I ran a small web design studio of my own, and after that I joined Svyaznoy, which became my first real product team.

While I was at Svyaznoy, my father and I also launched a small online store. By then, I already had a background in web design, but that store was probably where I first developed a real understanding of what a digital product actually is. You are no longer responsible only for the interface — you go through the whole journey, from the initial idea and understanding what people actually need to building a working business and shaping the customer’s overall experience.

Then my life changed in a wonderful way: my daughter was born. And with that came a fairly practical question: how could I keep doing something I enjoyed while significantly increasing my income? I spent about six months preparing and eventually joined Tinkoff.

That gave me experience on a completely different scale — both in product design and in understanding how design processes and teams are built, and how the design function operates within a large business.

How did you end up at Plata?

Oleg and the founders were putting together a team around specific challenges. David Isakhanyan — Plata’s CPO and formerly VP and Head of Design at Tinkoff — invited me to join. We had worked together before.

The pitch was roughly this: at your previous company, you have already become more of a manager. At Plata, you can go back to designing a product from scratch.

A Design Director with many years of management experience might not have gone for that. At the time, I had only been a design manager for about two and a half years.

I wanted to get hands-on with the product again, build everything from the ground up, and gain international experience at the same time.

Essentially, it was an opportunity to step away from management for a while and get back to making things — but with all the experience I had accumulated by then.

2. How Plata Got Started

If I understood correctly, you started building the product in September 2022 and launched in April 2023?

Yes. The first concept appeared in late August 2022. It was literally three screens. After that, we started working through every product flow in detail.

The first version did not account for the future brand identity at all. If anything, it was the other way around: the product itself largely informed the identity.

At the beginning, we approached design in a very pragmatic way. An early-stage startup does not need perfect design — it needs a system that allows the team to build the product quickly.

By around October or November, we already had a working design system, including a UI kit and Storybook. That allowed us to start implementing the first flows on the frontend fairly quickly and significantly accelerated development from that point on.

What did the team look like at the beginning?

We started with five designers, and between us we covered virtually every design-related task. The first designers on the team were highly multidisciplinary.

From the beginning, we had a principle: let’s do as much as we possibly can in-house. We only started outsourcing certain things much later, and even today we do it relatively rarely.

Today, the design team has around 30 people.

For comparison, the design teams at Revolut and Nubank number in the hundreds.

Did you start with the product or with the brand?

We started with the product.

But we had already begun exploring early logo concepts in the summer of 2022. There was no fully developed positioning at that point. We analyzed our future competitors in Mexico, looked at trends across the global fintech market, and started searching for our own visual direction.

At the end of July 2022, David showed one of the concepts to the future cofounders. We chose a type treatment and visual style everyone liked, and then spent roughly another six months refining it.

We liked that the logo was fairly simple but still distinctive — a blocky geometric sans-serif. The first comprehensive brand guidelines, however, did not appear until several months after launch.

Who came up with the name and the idea behind the logo?

That story is probably better heard firsthand. Oleg Tinkov told it in an interview with Ilya Varlamov.

Was the brand already integrated into the first version of the product?

No. The first version of the product came before the full brand identity. To some extent, we actually built the brand around the product.

3. Building the Brand Function

How did your approach to the brand evolve after launch?

We started with basic brand guidelines and communication principles.

Even before we had a full marketing function or brand managers, we already had UX writers. Over time, it became clear that product copy required dedicated expertise. It was important to look beyond the copy on an individual screen and think about how the product speaks to customers as a whole: what push notifications we send, what we write in the interface, and how customer support responds.

That gradually evolved into a broader set of communication principles across the entire product.

In May 2023, Plata hired a Brand Marketing Director. From that point on, work on the brand platform and external communications became much more systematic. We developed comprehensive brand guidelines covering design, marketing, and editorial principles.

UX writing, however, remains a separate discipline today and an integral part of the product team.

Who worked on the brand identity?

Alexander Nikolaev did most of the initial brand work.

One of his strengths is that he is a truly multidisciplinary designer. Sasha can develop a 3D visual style, work on the identity system, and show what a future website could look like. In other words, he can build a brand’s visual language across very different environments.

That was especially important early on. We did not yet have a large team of specialists, so we needed people who could handle very different kinds of work themselves.

Who owns the brand today?

I cannot point to a single brand lead because we simply do not have that role. Instead, the brand sits at the intersection of three areas: product, design, and marketing.

David represents the product side, I represent design, and Sergio and Timofey represent marketing. In practice, our teams work together on the brand every day.

I generally believe that a brand is not just what a brand team does.

For a product company, the brand is built across many touchpoints: what the app looks like, how it speaks to customers, what ads people see on the street, and what response they get from customer support.

Our brand marketing team is predominantly Mexican. They have a much better feel for the local cultural context: the language, humor, habits, and the kinds of things that work here — or, conversely, might be interpreted completely differently from how we expected.

4. The Role of Design at Plata

Did design influence business strategy from the beginning, or was it simply part of the product team?

From day one, there was a strong emphasis on design and very high expectations for it.

A lot of product work starts with design. First, we map out the flow and work through how the experience should work. Only then does development begin.

Of course, we relied heavily on our previous experience. We already had a good sense of conversion benchmarks.

and knew which solutions had worked before. But we still had to validate whether those same approaches would work in a different market with a different user base.

You became Design Director in April. What drove that change?

My role evolved as the company grew. At the very beginning, I was primarily focused on the app. Then branding became part of my scope, new areas emerged, and the ecosystem expanded with new products.

During its first two years, the company grew from around 20 people to roughly 2,000, so the design function had to scale alongside it.

Today, we have several major design areas: teams working on customer-facing products, platform products, and brand.

As a result, my work gradually shifted from directly designing a large part of the product to building the team and the system that allows design to operate at this scale. That said, I still do not want to give up hands-on design completely.

What kinds of decisions can designers at Plata make independently?

We have a fairly high level of trust.

If there is a hypothesis and we can test it quickly, we do not necessarily need to go through a long approval chain. Sometimes it is enough for the product team to align and launch a quick pilot.

For me, this is an important part of the culture: an idea can begin with intuition, but the decision about whether to take it further should be based on data.

For example, we initially launched the AI assistant in Plata Investments as a hypothesis. After launch, we looked at user behavior, saw a positive signal, and decided to develop it further.

Does design have its own KPIs?

I would separate my KPIs as Design Director from the goals within the design team.

At my level, the KPIs largely overlap with company and product goals. It would be strange if they did not.

Design should not exist as a separate function with goals that have no connection to business outcomes.

Within the design team, I translate those broader objectives into specific projects and milestones: what we need to launch or change over the next six months and which areas we need to develop.

Do you use KPIs for ad creative?

Yes. Performance marketing is where this is especially easy to see.

Design can be evaluated relatively quickly through data: CTR, conversion, acquisition cost, and the performance of different creative concepts and messages.

With brand communications, the impact is harder to measure directly and usually becomes visible over a longer time horizon. There, we look at brand tracking studies, brand awareness, consideration, and other indicators.

Within the product, we use shared product metrics: conversion within a specific flow, activation, frequency of use, retention, MAU/DAU. The exact set depends on the problem we are solving.

I am generally not a big believer in having a separate “design metric” just for the sake of having one. If we redesign onboarding, I care much more about whether more people successfully complete it than about how highly the designer personally rates the new interface.

5. How Design Impacts the Business

Which business metrics at Plata are most affected by the quality of design?

It is difficult to pick just one. In a digital bank, design affects almost the entire customer journey.

The most obvious example is conversion: how easily someone can become a customer, complete onboarding, order a card, or sign up for a new product. If a flow is complicated or confusing, we see the impact in the numbers fairly quickly.

Then there is activation, frequency of use, and retention. In performance marketing, it is CTR and acquisition cost.

But I do not really like trying to separate what came from design versus product. A great product is a team effort. Design can have a major impact on metrics, but the outcome is almost never the result of design alone.

If you had to name three metrics that a fintech CEO should use to understand whether design is working well, which ones would you choose?

I would look at three levels:

Business — Revenue: Is the business growing, and is the product making money?

User — NPS: Is the customer satisfied with the experience?

Product — Retention: Does the customer continue to actually use the product?

Are there separate metrics for brand identity?

We do not have a standalone metric specifically for brand identity. We treat it as part of the broader brand and evaluate it through overall brand and marketing metrics — primarily changes in brand awareness and the results of recurring brand tracking studies.

For specific campaigns or individual creatives, we can then compare CTR, conversion, and other performance metrics.

What are the biggest design mistakes companies make — in their processes, interfaces, and so on? Is there anything important that the industry systematically underestimates?

I think the biggest problem is going to extremes.

You can try to research and validate every single decision and end up dramatically slowing down the launch. Or you can do the opposite and make every decision purely on intuition.

The same applies to quality. You can optimize endlessly for speed and accumulate design debt and technical debt, or you can try to build a spaceship from day one instead of a working MVP.

The hardest part is constantly finding the right balance between speed, quality, and having enough data to make decisions.

Are there situations where the business asks for something the designers strongly disagree with? How do you resolve those conflicts?

Of course. It would be strange if we agreed on everything all the time.

But we typically do not have situations where someone from the business comes to a designer with a fully prescribed solution and says, “Design it exactly like this.” Instead, there is a problem or a business objective, and the team works together to find the right solution.

If a designer disagrees, they are expected to provide more than “I don’t like it.” They need to make a case and propose an alternative solution. The same works in the other direction.

Sometimes we debate for a long time. Sometimes we look at the data. Sometimes we create several alternatives and test the hypothesis with users. And sometimes we simply have to make a decision based on experience and common sense.

To me, a good designer is not someone who defends design at all costs. A good designer understands the business problem and can find a solution that works for both the user and the company.

What role does Oleg Tinkov play in product design and brand identity decisions?

Oleg is not directly involved in approving product design or brand identity work, but he is interested in what we are doing and occasionally shares his perspective on the brand and marketing. He has enormous experience, so it is always interesting to hear that additional perspective.

The actual product and brand decisions, however, remain the responsibility of the teams working on them every day.

6. Research, Analytics, and the Mexican Market

How is the Russian market different from the Mexican market?

When it comes specifically to financial products, the two biggest differences for me are cash and people’s relationship with banks.

Cash remains an important part of everyday life in Mexico, which means even a digital bank has to connect the digital product with the physical world.

In Russia, people have long been accustomed to strong digital banks and expect a lot from them. In Mexico, it is especially important not only to build a good product, but also to clearly communicate its value and earn the customer’s trust.

Who are your customers?

Today, most of our customers are adults, but we are looking more broadly and are already thinking about a younger audience for Plata.

We want to build a mass-market financial product that can eventually be useful to someone at different stages of their life.

How do you conduct research?

We regularly research both our audience and the market. We look at what customers write on social media and in app store reviews, what they contact customer support about, and the feedback they provide about the product.

There is very little “I like it / I don’t like it” decision-making here. Ultimately, we try to look at actual user behavior and the data.

Do you conduct qualitative research and customer discovery interviews?

It depends on the product and the hypothesis we are trying to test.

For example, qualitative research is particularly important for Plata Empresa, our B2B business. There, it is much harder to use our own experience as a proxy for the user. So the team regularly tests interfaces with entrepreneurs and people who directly work with business finances: accountants, finance professionals, and other specialists.

For consumer products, the approach is slightly different. We are all users of banking products ourselves every day. You could even say that one reason we started Plata was because, living in Mexico ourselves, we wanted a bank that was genuinely easy to use day to day.

But the main point is that some product hypotheses are easier to test by actually building the product than by asking someone, “Would you use this?”

If we strongly believe in an idea and can build an initial version relatively quickly, we often prefer to build it and observe actual user behavior. The first iteration might be rolled out internally to employees, then to a friends-and-family group, or to a small segment of the customer base.

Then we look at the data and feedback: how people use the feature, whether they come back to it, and where they run into problems. Based on that, we decide whether to refine it, scale it, or drop the idea.

I prefer an approach where research helps you choose the right way to test a hypothesis rather than becoming a mandatory step before every product decision.

A strong analytics team is incredibly helpful here. We can get data on funnels, navigation paths, and in-app interactions relatively quickly and see not just what users say about the product, but how they actually use it.

How systematically do you test different design variants? Do you have an example of a visual decision that had a measurable impact on performance?

Yes. Performance marketing is where this is particularly easy to see.

For example, we found that ad creatives with light backgrounds performed better for us than creatives with bright orange backgrounds. We first noticed it across several experiments, compared the results, and then simply started applying what we had learned.

In out-of-home advertising, however, bright orange remains one of our primary tools because it cuts through the visual clutter of the city.

So we do not start from scratch every time. Over time, you build up an understanding of which visual treatments and messages perform better, and you apply those learnings to future campaigns.

How will launching Plata in Colombia differ from launching in Mexico?

The biggest difference is experience.

In Mexico, we built a lot from scratch and learned as we went. We are entering Colombia much better prepared — technically, organizationally, and with a much deeper understanding of how to build a financial product.

Of course, it is a different market, so our goal is not to simply replicate what we did in Mexico. It is to adapt the strong foundation we already have to local users.

7. Product and Brand Redesign: Plata 2.0

This summer you redesigned the app and refreshed the brand identity. What problem were you trying to solve?

I would actually trace that story back to April. The main reason for the changes was very simple: we had become a bank.

After receiving our banking license, we had a significant amount of work to do to meet CNBV requirements — CNBV is Mexico’s financial regulator — including major changes to KYC and several other flows within the app.

But regulatory changes were only one part of it. By that point, the business itself had grown significantly. We needed to expand B2B, debit products, savings accounts, investments, payments, and other areas.

The first version of Plata was built largely around the credit card. Now we needed an app that could scale into a full bank with a much broader range of financial products.

At some point, we realized that if we were already going to rebuild the product this extensively, it was the right moment to rethink it as a whole — both the UX and the visual language.

That became Plata 2.0.

We rebuilt the app’s Home screen and made it more personalized. We streamlined the core user journeys and reworked Investments. There were also major changes under the hood: the app became faster and more stable.

At the same time, we refreshed the UI. We wanted the product to visually reflect what the company had become. We made the interface cleaner and more restrained, more mature, and slightly more conservative — without turning ourselves into a traditional bank.

So I would not really describe Plata 2.0 as simply a redesign. It was a point when the product design had to be rebuilt in response to the way the business itself had changed.

Who do you consider your competitors? Who were you looking at in the beginning, and who do you look to now?

We constantly follow what is happening in the Mexican market: Nubank, Mercado Pago, BBVA, and now Revolut as well.

But I would not say that we choose one company and use it as our benchmark. It is more interesting for us to look broadly at global fintech companies and how different teams solve specific product problems.

Revolut has a very strong product approach. I like Nu’s brand and communications. Robinhood is interesting in the way it simplifies investment products. So we are more interested in drawing on different signals from across the market than finding one reference to copy.

At the same time, Plata’s own position has changed over the last few years. When we started, we were mostly looking at the market and learning from others. Now you can see that the market is also looking at us.

I think Plata has had a meaningful impact on how digital financial products in Mexico look and evolve today. Competition has increased considerably: traditional banks are investing more actively in digital, fintech companies are developing their products faster, and the bar for what users expect from a financial app keeps rising.

That is one of the best outcomes of competition. Ultimately, the user wins. Yesterday, a great digital experience was a fintech differentiator. Today, it is gradually becoming a baseline expectation for any bank.

What does it feel like to go from working in a local market to competing with global brands such as Nubank and Revolut?

That is probably one of the reasons I still find working at Plata so interesting. Before, we were building a very strong product, but largely within a single market.

Here, the situation is different from day one: you no longer look at Nubank, Revolut, and other global companies simply as impressive case studies or references. You are competing with them for the same user.

What can you already say about the results of Plata 2.0? Was anything unexpected?

The most important thing is that the transition was relatively smooth. That is always a risk when you make significant changes to a product used by millions of people every day.

The unexpected part, perhaps, is how quickly users get used to those changes. Inside the team, you can spend months discussing the position of an element, a new Home screen, or a visual style. For the user, a few weeks later, it is simply Plata.

It is another reminder that we as designers think about design much more than our users do. And that is probably normal.

I noticed that the colors changed slightly as well. Can you tell us about that? Did DiDi Finance influence the decision?

DiDi is a Chinese technology giant that has become one of Mexico’s major mobility and financial services players, competing with Uber and serving millions of users.

In addition to ride-hailing and food delivery, DiDi has built an entire fintech ecosystem in the country: the DiDi Pay wallet, DiDi Préstamos, a fast microloan service, and the popular DiDi Card credit card, which offers high cashback to riders and drivers, including people who previously had limited access to traditional banking.

Bright orange is already strongly associated with Plata in Mexico.

DiDi Finance originally used blue, but as it expanded its financial products, it began using more orange — the color of its parent brand. Over time, its orange became brighter, and visually our brands started moving closer together.

At the same time, we wanted Plata to feel a little more serious, especially in the context of becoming a bank.

I suggested extending our orange palette toward burgundy and scarlet. That is how the gradient and additional shades emerged. We can now use them alongside our core orange. It gives the visual language more depth and, in my opinion, makes it feel slightly more premium.

Look — this color is everywhere in Mexico City!

(Alexander turns the camera toward the window and shows the red facades of Mexico City.)

Red has a deep historical connection to Mexico through cochineal, a natural dye used to produce carmine pigment from insects that live on cacti.

During the Aztec era and after the Spanish conquest, this vivid red pigment became one of the region’s most valuable resources. After silver, cochineal was the most valuable commodity New Spain exported to Europe.

I feel like I’ve heard this somewhere before…

Yes, yes, exactly (laughs). One of the ideas behind our brand is “premium service for everyone.”

Did you conduct research before changing the palette?

No. We did not run a separate research study specifically before changing the palette.

We are still very much within our existing orange territory. We expanded the palette rather than changing the brand color.

We developed several options, checked them with our Mexican colleagues, and then I — as we sometimes put it — had to “sell” the final direction internally and align it with the key stakeholders. The response was positive.

At what point did the team realize: we did it?

Getting the banking license and completing all the required checks was probably one of those moments. It was a major milestone for the entire team and confirmation that we had completed an important stage of the journey.

8. Bringing the Brand Into the Product

How deeply is the Plata brand integrated into the banking product itself?

We have this idea that interacting with Plata should create a wow moment from the very first touchpoint with the brand.

About a year after launch, we introduced the tagline Simplemente Maravilloso — “Simply Wonderful.” It was created by our marketing team together with a local advertising agency.

Over time, we realized that this idea describes not only our communications but also what the product itself should be like.

The first part is Simplemente — “simply.”

For a financial product, that is especially important. We try to keep the number of steps in the app to a minimum, simplify the information we show users, and simplify the language we use to explain financial products.

If someone has to stop and figure out what we meant, we probably did not design the experience well enough.

The second part is Maravilloso — “wonderful.”

Here, simply providing a good banking service is not enough. We want to give customers something slightly beyond what they expect.

For example, one of our ambassadors can deliver a card as soon as the next day. They do not simply hand over an envelope: they can help the customer get set up with the product and explain the key benefits. For the Mexican market, that kind of experience was largely new. The same was true of fast customer support. When we launched, response speed alone could create a wow moment.

Now, we are also looking at ATMs as another brand touchpoint. It is still a pilot, but we are gradually expanding the network and feel quite confident about the direction.

For me, it is important that the brand does not end with advertising or the interface. If we say Simplemente Maravilloso, customers should feel that idea at every touchpoint with Plata.

Speaking of the wow factor, I came across a YouTube video unboxing the welcome kit for guests at the Simplemente Maravilloso concert. It’s impressive. What do customers get with a regular card delivery?

I’ll just send you the unboxing video instead (laughs).

9. The Design Team Today

How is the Plata design team structured?

As I mentioned earlier, the team is divided into several major areas: product design, platform design, and brand design.

Most of our designers are from Eastern Europe, let’s put it that way, but we also have people from Mexico. I like the fact that different design traditions, cultural backgrounds, and professional experience come together within the team.

How is Mexican design culture different?

I was surprised by how strong the visual and creative culture is here.

Creative education gets quite a lot of attention starting in school and continuing through university. You can feel it in the environment itself: architecture, graphic design, art, the enormous number of museums, and the extent to which visual culture is part of everyday life.

At the same time, product and interface design as a discipline is still relatively young here. In my experience, it matured earlier in Eastern Europe alongside the growth of the digital industry and demand for specialists in this field.

In Mexico, that process is accelerating now. More strong digital companies and fintechs are emerging, and competition around product quality is increasing. That is helping raise the level of the entire digital product industry. Plata is part of that process as well.

You have offices in several countries. Can designers work remotely?

Yes, that option exists, but it depends heavily on the discipline and the team.

For example, we try to have a significant share of our graphic designers based in Mexico. For brand communications, it is important to understand the local cultural context and visual environment.

Product designers are a little different. They work more closely with their project and engineering teams, so they can be located in different countries. The main requirement is that their working hours fully overlap with their immediate team and partially overlap with Mexico.

Where else do you have offices?

We have two offices in Cyprus, in Limassol and Paphos, as well as offices in Barcelona, Serbia, Kazakhstan, Colombia, and Georgia, plus a coworking space in Armenia.

Who works in Barcelona, and how many people are there in the company overall?

Barcelona is home to product managers, designers, the HR team, and part of the engineering organization. The company has around 5,000 employees in total today.

How does working across time zones affect the design process?

Sometimes it is actually very convenient.

For example, part of our 3D team is based in Barcelona. I can come up with an idea in the evening in Mexico, write the brief, and send it to the team. Quite often, by the time I wake up in Mexico, we already have a first version.

It creates an almost around-the-clock design process. The key is to write a good brief before you go to sleep.

10. Growing the Design Team

Are you ready to manage a design team of several hundred people?

A lot depends on how the team is structured.

As the team grows, the Design Director’s job is no longer to manage every designer directly. You bring in design managers, leads, and heads of individual areas who take ownership of their respective teams.

So for me, the real question is not whether I am ready to manage several hundred designers. It is whether I can build a system that works effectively at that scale.

Today, we have a relatively small but very effective team. People understand what they own and why they are doing the work. One of the most important things here is hiring the right people.

In the past, we mostly hired senior designers and strong mid-level designers. Now the strategy is starting to change. The team is mature enough that we can hire junior designers, develop them internally, and pass on our culture and ways of working.

After the film about Plata came out, the number of people who wanted to join us increased noticeably, so it became a little easier to be selective.

What qualities do you look for when hiring designers?

Hard skills are usually fairly easy to evaluate from a portfolio and during the first technical interview. And of course, the exact skills depend on the role.

When it comes to soft skills, being proactive is probably the most important thing for me. I like people who do not need to be constantly told what to do next.

Persistence and the desire to keep improving the work are also important. You should not be too quick to accept that something is already “good enough.”

I sometimes joke that we are design nerds, in the best possible sense. We can stare at the work for a long time and keep asking ourselves what else could be improved.

But being good at design alone is not enough. Communication matters enormously: being able to explain your decisions, make a case for them, and present your work.

Ultimately, great products are built by teams. A designer needs to be able to work effectively with product managers, engineers, analysts, and everyone else involved.

I also value systems thinking and determination.

I clearly remember joining Tinkoff and suddenly finding myself surrounded by dozens of designers who were as strong as I was — and many who were significantly stronger.

That quickly gets rid of any sense that you have “made it” and can relax. Instead, you find yourself in an environment that constantly pushes you to get better.

11. AI and the Future of Design

How is AI being used inside Plata?

At this point, probably almost every team at Plata uses AI to some degree.

Initially, there was an enormous amount of hype around it. We experimented a lot as well, trying to understand what could be automated and where AI might replace parts of the traditional workflow. Then things settled down a little, and we started approaching it much more pragmatically.

AI can take a huge amount of routine work off our plate, but the quality of the output still depends heavily on the skills of the person using it.

We have a dedicated team that helps other teams identify use cases where AI can streamline processes and helps implement those workflows.

Does Alexander Nikolaev use AI in his work as a brand designer?

Yes. We actually have several real AI enthusiasts within the design team, and Sasha is definitely one of them. We experiment extensively with new tools and constantly try to integrate them into real production workflows.

What can AI already do in design?

Today, AI can already generate graphic assets and interface elements. But we have not yet reached the point where you can generate complete, production-ready UI and simply hand it off to engineering.

The result almost always requires some amount of manual refinement.

At the same time, AI is already very good at taking some of the work designers themselves do not particularly enjoy off their plate.

Presentations, documents, recurring reports, for example. We taught managers to create some of those materials themselves using AI, which took a significant amount of work off the design team’s plate.

One area we are particularly focused on right now is the design system. We already have a strong foundation, and we are gradually adapting it to work with AI.

Ultimately, we would like to reach a point where complete interfaces can be generated using our design system.

Which companies do you think are using AI particularly well right now?

It is difficult to evaluate other companies’ internal processes from the outside.

I have read Revolut’s report and watched an interview with Nu’s Design Director. Based on what these companies have shared publicly, it seems reasonable to assume that the major players in the market are already integrating AI quite actively — to different degrees — both into their internal workflows and directly into their products.

12. Personal

What was moving to Mexico like? Was the decision difficult, and how was the adjustment?

Mexico is the second country I have moved to, so I think I went through most of the emotional challenges of moving abroad earlier, when I moved to Cyprus.

Adjusting here was much easier. You already understand how to build a life in a new place. Plus, there is a large Plata community in Mexico. There are always people ready to help out, share advice, or simply invite you somewhere.

Have you made friends locally?

You could say something even better happened: I met my girlfriend, and she is Mexican.

So she became my closest friend here as well (smiles).

Describe a typical workday.

I usually get up early, even though I am naturally more of a night owl.

In the morning, I have a few calls or syncs with people in Europe. Then I have breakfast and usually arrive at the office around 9:30.

The busiest part of the day is typically before 2 p.m. After lunch, I have more meetings with the team in Mexico and try to leave at least some time for my own work. I usually finish around six.

Are you able to disconnect from work? What does that usually look like?

Yes. On regular weekends, I try to disconnect completely, spend time with people close to me, and simply do things I enjoy.

And if I have several days off, I will almost always choose the sea or the ocean. Being around water helps me recharge and calm down very quickly. Mexico is amazing in that sense: within a few hours, you can find yourself in completely different natural surroundings.

To close the interview: what is your single most important piece of advice for someone who wants to become a designer in 2026?

Do not obsess over tools. They change so quickly that your ideas, your visual taste, and your ability to tell a good solution from a bad one matter much more.

And I do not believe there is a perfect course that automatically turns you into a good designer. What matters much more is how passionate you are about the profession, whether you are willing to try, make mistakes, learn from them, and try again. That is how experience is built.

AI and new tools can help you move faster, but they cannot take that journey for you.

Share Your Experience

We invite you to take part in our research project, “The Impact of Design on Fintech Growth.”

We’re speaking with people who influence product, business, brand, or customer experience — or simply work with design as part of their role.

You can participate anonymously or through a public interview.

Our goal is to understand the role design plays in business growth and identify the best practices that help companies build strong products and brands.

If you’d like to take part, reach out to me on Telegram: @mostmax or Linkedin

Maxim Mostovoi,
founder of fintech design studio MSHD

“We’re design nerds.” Alexander Syrov on how Plata builds its product, brand, and team was originally published in mshd.design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The company tested more than 50 payment methods with buyers across 200 countries, analyzing more than 2 million payment method–country combinations to understand how the mix of available methods affects conversion and revenue.

When at least one additional relevant payment method beyond cards was dynamically surfaced, conversion increased by an average of 7.4%, while revenue grew by 12%.

Despite its apparent simplicity, checkout is one of the most complex interfaces in fintech. Get it wrong and it can kill conversion. Get it right and it can unlock growth where the business never expected to find it.

For more than 6 years, the moosehead team has been designing global checkouts and merchant portals. We analyzed our experience and distilled it into 18 principles that help increase conversion, accelerate development, and make payment products easier to scale and maintain.

1. Flexibility Is the Defining Feature of a Modern Checkout

A modern checkout should not be designed as a fixed sequence of screens. This becomes especially important when working with global merchants: one needs Pix in Brazil, another needs Klarna, while a third requires custom payment-method selection logic.

A good checkout should work as a composable system. It needs to be assembled quickly from prebuilt components and modules and easily adapted to a specific market, merchant, or payment flow.

2. The Checkout Should Adapt to the Merchant’s Brand

According to 2025 research from Baymard Institute, 19% of users abandoned checkout because they did not trust the site with their credit card information.

The checkout should feel like a natural extension of the merchant’s product experience.

Merchants should be able to configure the logo, colors, typography, corner radii, and other visual parameters, including dark mode.

At the same time, customization needs clear guardrails so the checkout remains stable, scalable, and maintainable without compromising conversion.

3. The Simpler the Design System, the More Robust

The challenge is to find the right balance between customization and design system stability.

The fewer text styles, colors, components, icons, and layout grids the system contains, the easier it is to customize the checkout for new merchants and roll out system-wide changes.

Stripe, for example, deliberately limits customization in its prebuilt Checkout: 20 preset fonts, 3 border-radius options, plus controls for the logo, background, and button color. Primer follows the same underlying principle, using a controlled set of styling variables and design tokens.

This gives merchants enough freedom to make the checkout feel like their brand without allowing the system to fragment into dozens of unique implementations that become expensive to maintain.

4. Keep the Color System Tightly Constrained

Checkout colors are best divided into two distinct categories: brand colors and semantic colors.

• Brand colors adapt the checkout experience to each individual merchant.
• Semantic colors communicate critical interface states — such as error, success, warning, and disabled.

This approach keeps the system visually consistent while still allowing enough flexibility for customization.

5. Five Text Styles Are Usually Enough

A checkout interface does not require a complex typographic hierarchy. Users need to grasp the essential details — the total amount, selected payment method, input fields, and the primary action — as quickly as possible.

For most checkout systems, four to five text styles are usually enough to cover web, mobile web, and native applications.

Fewer styles mean less complexity in development, maintenance, and scaling.

6. Use No More Than Two Typefaces

Use no more than two typefaces in a checkout: a primary UI typeface and, if needed, a brand or display typeface.

• The brand typeface can be used for headings to inject personality.
• The primary UI typeface handles input fields, buttons, amounts, validation messages, and other functional text.

Both can change as part of merchant customization, but their roles must remain consistent: one prioritizes readability and interface stability, while the other adds brand character.

For example, Inter offers strong support for Latin and Cyrillic scripts, but Chinese and Japanese require dedicated fallback fonts.

Your typography system must account for scripts that the primary family does not support.

7. Keep the Icon Set Limited and Manageable

Use one core set of UI icons for navigation, statuses, errors, and other functional use cases.

When adapting the checkout to a merchant, change the style of the set as a whole rather than modifying individual icons. If a different visual language is required, replace the complete set.

Payment-network and bank logos should live separately as dedicated assets rather than as part of the UI icon system.

Fundraise Up, a US-based fundraising platform used by more than 3,500 nonprofits, ran an interesting experiment around this question. In 2023, its designers tested whether familiar Visa, Mastercard, and other card-network logos were actually necessary in checkout. The team considered them largely decorative and wanted to free up space for more functional UI.

The A/B test ran for 52 days and covered approximately 244,700 visitors who selected card payment across desktop and mobile. Half saw the card-network logos; half did not.

Removing them produced no statistically significant decline in any primary metric. Recurring-donation conversion increased by 3.39%, while overall conversion on Android increased by 1.6%.

After the experiment, Fundraise Up removed the logos and used the space for functional interface elements.

8. Use Currency Codes Where Symbols Can Be Ambiguous

For a global checkout, ISO 4217 currency codes (such as USD, EUR, BRL, and AED) are often safer than currency symbols. The $ symbol, for example, is shared by US, Canadian, Australian, and several other dollars.

Currency notation can also evolve. The UAE dirham, commonly written as AED, Dh, or Dhs, received a new official symbol from the Central Bank of the UAE on March 27, 2025, along with specific guidelines for digital interfaces.

Three-letter currency codes are much easier to maintain and significantly harder for users to misinterpret.

9. Design Tokens Should Drive Customization

Colors, typography, spacing, corner radii, sizing, and component states should all be controlled through a shared system of design tokens.

Change a brand-color token or a radius token once, and that change propagates automatically to every button, field, and component that references it.

This dramatically speeds up checkout assembly for a specific merchant, removing the need to manually tweak dozens of screens.

10. The Design System Should Be Built Atomically

Start with the smallest reusable building blocks and use them to construct progressively more complex parts of the experience. In our projects, the hierarchy typically looks like this:

Tokens → Atoms → Master components → Master screens → Production components → Storybook → Figma↔code → Product assembly → AI

A change at a lower level should propagate automatically wherever that element is used.

This allows our clients to assemble customized checkouts from reusable building blocks — such as payment-method selectors, card forms, and buttons — rather than designing and developing every implementation from scratch.

Adyen explicitly lists faster time to market and reduced development effort among the benefits of using prebuilt components. Primer arrived at a similar modular, component-based checkout architecture after talking to merchants who wanted deep customization without spending months building their own frontend.

11. Use Prebuilt Flows for Standard Payment Methods and Flexible Assembly for Non-Standard Ones

Cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, bank transfers, and other popular methods should be available as prebuilt flows. This allows them to be quickly enabled for a new merchant without additional product design.

For non-standard methods, the system should make it possible to quickly assemble new flows from existing modules and components.

12. Payment-Method Selection Is One of the Checkout’s Most Important Components

Users need to find the right way to pay quickly. The more markets and payment methods the checkout supports, the harder this task becomes.

Stripe, for example, uses more than 100 signals — including customer location, currency, amount, transaction type (one-time purchase, subscription, or recurring payments), and other parameters — to determine which payment methods to display and how to order them.

The cost of getting this wrong is high. Baymard research found that 11% of users will abandon checkout if their preferred payment option is unavailable, while 21% of sites fail to offer even one third-party payment method.

In a global product, payment-method selection essentially transforms into a standalone payment-method prioritization system.

13. Payment States Directly Affect Conversion

Success, pending, decline, cancellation, and error states should never become dead ends for the user. Each one needs to explain exactly what happened and what to do next. The failed payment scenario is particularly critical: instead of a generic “Payment failed” message, the checkout should actively guide the user to complete the transaction — either by retrying or by immediately suggesting an alternative available payment method.

According to Baymard, 10% of users abandon their purchase after a card decline, while 17% drop out due to technical errors or site crashes.

• Briqpay analyzed more than 31,500 payment retries and found that among successful retries, the median time from the initial failed attempt to successful payment was around 100 seconds.
• Stripe found that specific, actionable error messaging can increase retry rates following a decline by up to 3.5%.

Therefore, when a transaction fails, it is not enough to simply inform the user that the payment did not go through. The system must immediately help them complete it.

14. Localization Needs to Be Built into the System from Day One

For a global checkout, localization is much more than translating text. You need to account for currencies, date formats, addresses, phone numbers, and — most importantly — local payment habits.

Stripe analyzed data from almost 20,000 B2C companies and found that even a single payment method that is not geographically relevant to the customer can reduce conversion by as much as 15%. Local methods produce the opposite effect: BLIK increased conversion in Poland by an average of 46%, while Pix increased conversion in Brazil by 31%.

In another Stripe experiment covering 1.5 million subscription checkout sessions, offering prices in the customer’s local currency through Adaptive Pricing increased conversion by 4.7% and the authorization rate by 1.9%.

We design for localization from the very beginning and test the system against a baseline set of markets: the US, Germany, Brazil, China, the UK, Indonesia, India, South Africa, and Japan.

This lets us see early on how language, currency, text length, data formats, and available payment methods change from market to market.

15. Design QA Should Continue Throughout Development

Checkout design does not end when the Figma files are handed over to developers. Regular design reviews and implementation QA are essential — especially for component states, responsive behavior, localization, and customized versions.

One useful approach is to connect Figma with Storybook, allowing designers to immediately spot discrepancies between the design and the implementation.

One Checkout.com team connected Figma directly to its React Native codebase, enabling designers to generate production-ready UI code directly from Figma while engineers shifted into a review role. The company says some features can now move from mockup to production in a fraction of the time.

A design that works perfectly only in Figma has no value for the business. Users need to receive the same interface and flows that were originally designed.

16. The Payment Journey Does Not End at Checkout

Prepare templates for email notifications, invoices, receipts, and other payment documents in advance. They should follow the same visual language and work correctly across different merchants, currencies, and locales.

Stripe, for example, applies the same brand settings across its checkout, transactional emails, online invoices, and PDF documents.

Adyen separately emphasizes that requirements for payment receipts vary by country and payment network and can change over time. That is why they are better designed as part of the product rather than assembled at the last minute.

Beyond checkout

17. As the Merchant Base Grows, a Full-Featured Merchant Portal Becomes Essential

If your product serves hundreds or thousands of merchants, manual onboarding quickly becomes an operational bottleneck. The merchant portal should support self-service onboarding, payment routing and checkout configuration, user management, a user-friendly and informative dashboard, and much more.

moosehead has extensive experience designing merchant portals for payment companies. These portals are used either by the PSP’s own merchants or by merchants of partner PSPs. For the second scenario, we design for white-label deployment from the start, allowing the portal to be customized for each partner’s brand.

We recently published a case study on the redesign of the merchant portal for payment orchestration platform UpGate.

18. Enterprise Portals Can Be Simpler

If a company works with a limited number of large enterprise clients and onboards each one manually, the merchant portal does not necessarily need to become a complete self-service product. A basic set of features for daily operations may be enough: a dashboard, analytics, transactions, and core settings.

Free Audit of Your Checkout or Merchant Portal

If you want to understand what can be improved in your checkout or merchant portal — from UX/UI and the design system to collaboration between design and frontend development — send me a message on Telegram.

We’ll run a free checkup and identify your biggest growth opportunities.

Maxim Mostovoy
Founder of moosehead

18 Principles of Global Checkout Design: Lessons from moosehead and Industry Leaders was originally published in mshd.design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Семь фаундеров выступили перед тремя экспертами и получили полезную обратную связь на свои проекты.

Митап проходил в одном из залов Tech Barcelona — независимая организация, которая объединяет более 1500 стартапов и помогает в привлечении инвестиций и B2B партнеров в самых разных индустриях Испании и США.

В этот раз сразу три проекта были ориентированы на испанский рынок и сейчас я расскажу вам о том как это было.

Приветствие

Митап начался с моей приветственной речи на правах основателя VC Startups и студии продуктового дизайна Moosehead. Я рассказал о появлении нового сервиса в нашем комьюнити, Стартап-терапии.

Стартап-терапия это динамичные воркшопы с опытными фаундерами и экспертами индустрии, с помощью которых фаундеры и их команды могут кратно увеличить шансы на успех компании.

Тема воркшопов — любая. Кастдев, дизайн, разработка, маркетинг, привлечение инвестиций, тайм-менеджмент, устойчивая продуктивность и тд.

Партнеры

Далее я представил партнеров Pitch Day:

1. EasyStaff — международный сервис выплат фрилансерам и удалённым сотрудникам.

На митапе выступил фаундер EasyStaff, Виталий Михайлов, тема — опыт применения zero/ low код технологий при разработке МВП.

2. Spain Costas — агентство недвижимости Испании. Продажа, подбор или покупка жилой/ коммерческой недвижимости, управление и инвестиции с прибыльностью 20%

Выступления стартапов

1. Артем Маслов, фаундер Foxtery. Foxtery — ИИ-платформа, которая автоматизирует обучение, структурирует знания и развивает сотрудников, экономя время и повышая эффективность работы команды.

Как это работает — загружаете существующую документацию в любом формате и на выходе получаете готовый корпоративный курс в удобном формаете на выбор — текст, аудио или видео.

2. Миша Климовский, кофаундер Neonoo — когнитивный тренажёр для детей с различиями в обучении и мышлении. Продукт объединяет тактильные девайсы и телесно-ориентированные образовательные и терапевтические игры для улучшения обучения и ментального здоровья детей от 3 до 12 лет.

3. Евгений Писарев, фаундер Nmbr и ex-Qummy ($9M raised, Alchemist, IPO prospect)

Nmbr — это сервис мгновенной AI аренды с гарантированными платежами для лендлордов.

4. Дмитрий Островцев, кофаундер Hiro.

Hiro занимается электрификацией городской мобильности, предоставляя бизнесу и горожанам эффективные решения для двухколесной техники с системой сменных батарей по подписке.

5. Елена Зангеева, фаундер Kvistly — платформы для создания квизов с помощью ИИ для тренингов и тимбилдингов.

6. Роман Селиван, основатель Monotomy.

Monotomy– мобильное приложение для формирования здоровых привычек в составе группы единомышленников.

7. Юрий Камаев, фаундер HOUSAGE — маркетплейс услуг по уходу за пожилыми людьми.

Наши эксперты

Люди, без которых наш митап не смог бы состоятья!

1. Андрей Перфильев, cерийный предприниматель в HealthTech, сооснователь ATLAS Biomed Group, бизнес-ангел.

2. Иван Золочевский, CEO венчурного клуба AltaClub.VC

3. Ольга Широкова, EdTech предприниматель, CEO в arol.dev, ментор стартапов и студентов в ESADE, фаундер KIARA — одно из самых больших femtech комьюнити Испании.

Нетворкинг

В конце митапа состоялся традиционный сеанс лучшего нетворкинга в Барселоне.

Отдельная благодарность

За помощь в проведении мероприятия отдельно хочу поблагодарить соорганизаторов нашего комьюнити — Владимира и Дениса, фаундеров студии разработки для стартапов Cozy Ventures.

Друзья, спасибо, за поддержку комьюнити и посещение наших митапов. За нашими мероприятиями удобнее всего следить в инстаграме — подписывайтесь!

Сейчас, два года спустя, в моем списке контактов 800 человек, со многими из которых мы по-настоящему дружим, создаем коллаборации и запускаем новые проекты. Как мне это удалось, будучи интровертом? Попробую ответить.

Переезд в Испанию

Барселону мы выбрали еще до ковида: климат, море и близость гор, культурная жизнь, удобный хаб. Идеальный баланс между мегополисом и деревней. Переезжать хотели плавно, поэтапно решая вопросы с бытом и поиском междунардных заказчиков, но в итоге все случилось за два дня. 26 февраля я начал пересобирать жизнь, сидя в кафе с видом на Саграду.

Я фаундер студии дизайна для стартапов и большинство наших клиентов находились тогда в России. Главный источник новых проектов — нетворк на офлайн-мероприятиях и сарафанное радио.

Заблокированные карты намекали на необходимость поиска глобальных проектов, но как это сделать в стране, где тебя никто не знает? Большая часть моего окружения релоцировалась в Ереван, Тбилиси, Белград и Дубай — туда, где не требовались визы.

О том, что уже через полгода Барселона начнет превращаться в мекку фаундеров мы даже не мечтали.

Стартап-комьюнити

Однажды я скроллил ленту фейсбука и наткнулся на пост в группе YCombinator in Russian, в котором автор интересовался о существовании в Барселоне чатика фаундеров. Недолго думая, я создал телеграм-группу и кинул ссылку в комментарии — “чатик есть!”. Так я получил тридцать первых участников, один из которых стал первым клиентом нашей студии на испанском рынке.

Сообщество стало для меня третьим по счету, но точно первым по значению. Прежде я организовывал беговое ссобщество для ребят из финтеха и чат взаимопомощи для совершенно незнакомых мне людей, застрявших в стамбульском аэропорту на трое суток из-за снегопада. Сейчас я шучу, что это было MVP барселонского чата.

MVP давно позади. Мы стали полноценным сообществом с регулярными встречами самых разных форматов от волейбола на пляже до Pitch Day с приглашенными экспертами из инвестиционных фондов.

Недавно мы запустили новый формат — что-то среднее между воркшопами и мастермайндами. Собираемся группами до десяти человек и по очереди обсуждаем задачи каждого участника. Уникальный обмен опытом и свежий взгляд со стороны.

Заметьте, для создания комьюнити мне не понадобилось ничего, кроме инициативы и элементарных навыков нетворкинга. Я оказался в нужное время в нужном месте.

Нетворкинг.

Признаюсь, не люблю этот термин. Он пахнет искусственной елкой, табличками в экселе и сыном маминой подруги. Отчасти это связано с людьми, которые превращают создание связей в спорт и бизнес. “Ставлю план на год — тысяча новых друзей!” — регулярно встречаю такие посты в ленте фейсбука.

Что это значит на практике? Сбор заявок в гуглдоке с жесткой фильтрацией. Цель — найти пару десятков полезных контактов среди сотен и рост числа подписчиков через обещание дружбы. Мне это напоминает те же холодные продажи, слегка разогретые в микроволновке.

Кстати, именно так я и пришел к нетворкингу — через нелюбовь к холодным продажам. Мне нужно было найти покупателей оборудования для эквайринга нового типа, но почти никто из руководителей предприятий не соглашался на встречу — люди не понимали о чем идет речь.

Тогда я создал сайт “Бизнес в Лицах” и начал брать у них интервью. Я действовал через пиар-отделы и не получил ни одного отказа! Два часа приятной беседы, после которой мы становились лучшим друзьями. Пиарщики получали публикации, директора и собственники славу, я — перевыполнение плана.

Это был 2012 год, до появления вДудь оставалось пять лет.

Лучший нетворкинг начинается с вашего полезного действия.

Зачем нужен нетворкинг

Помните, я упомянул про чатик стамбульского аэропорта? Расскажу подробнее. Я возвращался из Дубровника в Москву через Стамбул и оказался запертым в снежном плену. Ежеминутные изменения в расписании, огромные расстояния между билетными кассами, стойками регистрации и другими службами.

Я решил, что мне лень бегать по терминалу и, встретив группу незнакомых друг с другом москвичей, предложил им создать чатик для обмена информацией о рейсах и общей ситуации в разных концах аэропорта. Теперь мы могли перевести дух и немного расслабиться в окружении теплых людей. С некоторыми дружим до сих пор!

Четыре месяца спустя, я также выдохнул после создания барселонского чата, в котором почти сразу появилсь старожилы с их опытом и знаниями о местном быте. Мы все выдохнули.

Нетворк это поддержка.

Другой пример. После блокировок карт я полетел в одну из дружественных стран открывать счета. Что делают люди в таких ситуациях? Гуглят в поисковиках и чатах релокантов. Что делаю я? Пишу пост в фейсбуке, меня знакомят с представителями трех банков, через три дня меняю пин-код на привычный.

Нетворк это экономия времени.

Еще пример. Сейчас нашей студии дизайна три года. Два года назад мы остро нуждались в менторстве более опытных фаундеров, имевших большой опыт международных проектов. Продажи, коллаборации, организация команды, лучшие фреймворки. Как вы наверное уже догадались, я создал чатик с арт-директорами и владельцами студий, переехвшими в Барселону. Вместе мы провели несколько воркшопов, итогом которого стал длинный список лайфхаков.

Нетворк это рост бизнеса.

Три типичных ошибки в нетворкинге

1. Низкая культура самопрезентации.”Макс, привет! Я Миша, друг Олега, добавь меня, пожалуйста в чат”. “Макс, хочу попасть завтра на закрытый митап для фаундеров” — каждые два дня мне пишут подобные сообщения незнакомые люди. Другая крайность — слишком подробные рассказы о себе в отрыве от контекста.

Если я хочу попасть на закрытое мероприятие для ценителей вина, я не буду рассказывать о себе как о владельце дизайн-студии или основателе сообщества стартаперов. Я скажу, что много лет изучаю вина, посещал курсы сомелье и предпочитаю красные вины из таких-то регионов таких-то стран, а ваша встреча — моя заветная мечта.

Запомните простую формулу: “кто ты, что хочешь, что можешь дать”. Заранее подготовьте несколько вариантов самопрезентации разных объемов и форматов (устный и письменный), изучив вашего собеседника. Будьте полезны!

2. Пустой профиль в мессенджерах. Мы освоили соцсети и даже научились заполнять профили в Линкедин, но так и не научились эффективно использовать главные инструменты современной коммуникации. Я получаю как минимум один запрос в месяц на дизайн только благодаря переходу в мой профиль из различных чатиков.

3. Навязчивость или избыточная самореклама. Между уместной просьбой и навязчивостью очень тонкая грань.

Пример. Два месяца назад мне в личку написал один шапочно знакомый маркетолог с предложением вступить в его канал о маркетинге. Я ничего не ответил на такую бестактность. Несколько дней спустя, другой мой знакомый рассказал о создании канала в виде забавной новости. Он не поставил меня в неловкое положение и дал право свободного выбора. Одно и тоже действие в одном случае вызвало раздражение, а в другом — благодарность и восхищение.

Как научиться нетворкингу?

Базовыми навыками можно овладеть, ежедневно следуя советам ChatGPT. Серъезно, я ввел соотвутствующий запрос и получил довольно полезную инструкцию.

Но я предлагаю более эффективное решение. Полгода назад я начал глубоко изучать вопрос нетворкинга. В этом мне помогала команда маркетингового агентства Стратата. Вместе мы провели исследование того как именно сейчас создают связи релоканты.

Большинство испытывает трудности с выстраиванием окружения с нуля. Это психологически тяжело на фоне всех остальных задач.

Осознав серьезность проблемы, мы с командой Стрататы систематизировали информацию и разработали решение в виде двухнедельного курса, пройдя который, вы сможете значительно улучшить свои коммуникативне навыки. Индивидуальные сессии в формате динамичных зум-звонков.

Вместе мы прокачаем ваши соцсети, создадим интро, бьющее в сердечки и разработаем детальный план.

Интересно? Пишите мне в телеграм. Первым десяти участникам специальные условия.

Важная деталь — FM не повторяется дважды в одном городе, поэтому все, кто посетил нас в прошлый понедельник, участники исторического события. Хорошая новость в том, что VC Startups регулярно проводит встречи фаундеров в Барселоне на самые разные тематики, в тч в формате Pitch Day.

О Founders Mondays

Формат предполагает пятиминутные выступления 4–5 фаундеров с питчами проектов и обратной связью от трех экспертов, наиболее опытных предпринимателей. Общение происходит примерно час в присутствии зрителей, после чего объявляется время свободного нетворкинга всех со всеми.

В этот раз нас было 100 человек! Большинство — фаундеры стартапов на самых разных стадиях, от идеи до B+.

Митап проходил в одном из залов Tech Barcelona — независимой некоммерческой организиации, которая объединяет более 1500 стартапов и помогает им привлекать инвестиции и B2B партнеров в самых разных индустриях.

Интро

Первым выступил я на правах хоста. После короткого приветствия, рассказал о создании на базе нашего сообщества one-stop shop сервиса для запуска и развития стартапов. Мы бесплатно консультруем международные команды по вопросам дизайн-процессов, маркетинга, пиара, финансового моделирования (p&l) и стратегического планирования.

Выступления спикеров

1. Борис Преображенский, сооснователь логистической компании Starbien Logistic. Борис запустил доставку коммерческих грузов и частных посылок между Испанией и Россией (+весь мир), став официальным представителем СДЭК в Барселоне.

2. Михаил Трофимов, CEO и кофаундер Revealbot, платформы для автоматизации маркетинга с готовыми решениями на каждом этапе воронки. Сервисом пользуются сотни команд по всему миру, а общя сумма маркетинговых бюджетов под управлением Revealbot превышает 500 млн. долларов в год.

3. Артем Косарев, CEO и кофаундер Kamina, платформа для ментального здоровья, использующая технологии AI. Пользователи могут найти терапевта под свой запрос, а терапевты получают инструменты для создания отчетов о каждом сеансе и планирования работы с клиентами.

4. Кирилл Ильичев, кофаундер музыкальной социальной сети MUBR, где можно послушать музыку друзей. Стартап ищет инвестиции на сид раунде, здесь их полная презентация.

5. Дмитрий Цивилев, СЕО и кофаундер Giftery, платформа для запуска и дистрибуции электронных подарочных карт.

В России Giftery один из лидеров рынка с годовым объемом транзакций 25 млн. долларов. Дмитрий рассказал историю создания компании и о том, с чем они столкнулись при выходе на Испанский рынок.

Выступления были яркими и динамичными во многом благодаря нашим экспертам, выступивших в тот день в роли менторов. По лицам спикеров было заметно, что некоторые рекомандации они начнут применять на следующий же день.

Эксперты

1. Кирилл Куликов, кофаундер YC стартапа Beau, автор знаменитоого телеграм-канала @kyrillic

2. Андрей Перфильев, серийный предприниматель в HealthTech, сооснователь ATLAS Biomed Group, инвестор.

Андрей опытный предприниматель и активный инвестор. Kamina один из его проектов.

3. Иван Золочевский, CEO и управляющий партнер венчурного клуба AltaClub, являющегося частью фонда AltairCapital Игоря Рябенького.

Зрители

А теперь несколько слов о тех, кто вечером понедельника нашел в себе силы приехать на митап и встретиться с единомышленниками. Как я уже упоминал выше, половина из них фаундеры стартапов. Остальные — c-level менеджеры, маркетологи, владельцы студий дизайна и разработки.

Анонс

В начале декабря мы проводим Woman’s Pitch Day для женщин основательниц. Присылайте свои питчи мне в телеграм!

P.S. И не забудьте подписаться на наш инстаграм, чтобы не пропускать мероприятия VC Startups

Меня зовут Макс Мостовой, я кофаундер студии дизайна Moosehead и основатель VC Startups Barcelona. Полтора года назад я переехал в столицу Каталонии и почти сразу задумался о создании комьюнити стартаперов для комфортной адаптации предпринимателей к новой жизни. И вообще, с ними веселее.

VC Startups Barcelona

Сейчас в нашем сообществе 640 человек — основатели стартапов, инвесторы и c-level специалисты. Формат — группа в телеграме и камерные тематические ивенты (15–20 участников), на которых мы знакомимся, находим кофаундеров и решаем насущные вопросы. От открытия компании в Испании до выхода на глобальные рынки и привлечение инвестиций.

А еще мы вместе играем в волейбол, гоняем на хайкинг, устраиваем завтраки и делимся бытовыми лайфхаками. В общем, это не “еще один чатик”, а полноценное комьюнити близких по духу людей.

Идея Pitch Day

Идея провести ивент, посвященный нетворку стартапов с инвесторами давно витала в воздухе, но материализовалась благодаря Антону Шкуровичу, фаундеру стартапа Ameetee и одновременно венчурному партнеру Altair Capital.

Мы познакомились с Антоном во время моего майского путешествия в Тель-Авив и решили, что было бы классно устроить в Барселоне питч дэй во время его отпуска в Испании. Сказано — сделано.

Организация

За две недели до мероприятия мы успели найти помещение, отобрать одиннадцать проектов и зарегистрировать шесть инвесторов. Главной целью было тестирование формата и нетворк амбициозных людей. В будущем эти встречи должны превратиться в площадку для реальных сделок.

Местом проведения выбрали The Social Hub — ультра современный коворкинг, уютную переговорку которого нам любезно предоставили участники сообщества — агентство Pride Marketing.

Pitch Day

В 19:00 начался сбор гостей и через полчаса я, на правах организатора, выступил с первой презентацией. Рассказал о планах сообщества и опыте студии Moosehead в работе со стартапами.

Следующим выступил Степан Логинов — в качестве представителя Altair Capital.

Степан рассказал о запуске в Испании Altaclub — проект Altair Capital для частных инвесторов с минимальным порогом входа 200 тыс. евро.

И вот, наступила очередь для выступлений стартапов! (По ссылкам можно найти презентации проектов).

1. Actogram. Сервис мониторинга циркадных ритмов по данным смарт-часов и фитнес-трекеров. Данные передаются врачам и исследователям для анализа и выявления закономерностей.

2. Aino. Платформа для совместной работы городских дизайнеров. “Миро для архитекторов”– так описывают сервис его основатели. Платформа уже работает!

3. Nido. Сервис для управления финансами владельцев квартир под краткосрочную аренду. Организуют потоки и помогают пользователям экономить деньги и время. Одна из самых красивых презентаций вечера — некоторые инвесторы предположили, что продукт уже готов (магия дизайна).

4. Smart Barcelona. Детский образовательный центр профессий будущего в Барселоне — готовят будущих айтишников и ученых.

5. SoundHub. Еще одна платформа для совместной работы, на этот раз для создателей музыки и аудиопродуктов. SoundHub помогает на этапе микширования и мастеринга трека после того, как звук был записан в студии.

6. Telespace. Первая платформа для автоматизации покупки рекламы в Телеграм со встроенным сервисом статистики и аналитики. Стартап упрощает коммуникацию между рекламодателями и владельцами телеграм-каналов, а бренды получают прозрачные отчеты.

7. Ameetee делает венчурный рынок доступным для частных клиентов финансовых институтов. У команды уже есть MVP инвестиционной платформы, инфраструктура, первые подключенные партнеры и проведенные сделки.

После каждого выступления фаундеры отвечали на вопросы инвесторов и гостей, наиболее активным из которых был Артем Овечкин, серийный предприниматель и бизнес-ангел.

Много вопросов было и от Андрея Перфильева, основателя Atlas Biomed и ряда других компаний. Андрей создает в Испании венчурную студию в Health Tech индустрии и открыт для общения в Telegram

После выступления фаундеров мы сделали фото на память и еще долго не расходились, продолжая общаться.

Если вы фаундер технологического стартапа или инвестор, проживающий в Испании, будем рады видеть вашу заявку в Telegram, добавляйтесь!

С предложениями и комментариями можно обратиться напрямую ко мне — Макс Мостовой

Наша команда

Нас было пятеро, я, Максим Мостовой, сооснователь студии дизайна MOOSEHEAD, мой партнер Кирилл Макаров и наши друзья из студии NOVADO — основатель Илья Краев и разработчики Денис Садомов и Максим Батчиков.

Идея 1.0

На момент подачи заявки у меня уже была идея проекта на СБП и вот как она родилась. После ужина с друзьями я решил протестировать сервис раздельной оплаты счета в приложении банка. Для клиентов этого банка процесс выглядел бесшовно — переход по ссылке и оплата в один клик. Для не клиентов требовалось ввести данные карты. Сложновато. В итоге я просто скинул в чатик номер телефона и фотографию чека.

А как было бы здорово сформировать запрос денег через СБП и бесшовно перекидывать участников покупки в приложения их банков по ссылке.

Идея 2.0

Но для регистрации на хакатоне наша идея не годилась, потому что по условиям, платежный инструмент должен упрощать работу бизнес-клиентов банка с покупателем, а не покупателей между собой.

Быстро посовещавшись, мы пивотнулись и придумали сервис для групповой оплаты на сайтах интернет-магазинов.

Представьте ситуацию. Коллектив хочет купить подарок коллеге на день рождения. Создается очередной чат, просьба “сколько не жалко”, номера карты. Параллельно здесь же обсуждается идея подарка.

Дальше организатору нужно отслеживать, кто еще не перевел, а другим участникам отвлекаться на заполнение реквизитов. Можно сделать удобнее.

Организатор идет на сайт магазина, выбирает групповую оплату и отправляет участникам ссылки для бесшовной оплаты через СБП — нужно только кликнуть на ссылку и вы оказываетесь в приложении своего банка с уже предзаполненной суммой.

Заполнив короткую анкету, мы подали заявку на участие в хакатоне. Всего было подано 935 заявок и только 120 из них прошли отбор. Мы заняли 11 место в категории “Платить легко”, попав в список топ-команд.

Первый этап хакатона

Мероприятие проходило два дня и к концу первого мы должны были показать бета-версию прототипа, периодически созваниваясь с менторами от банка.

Для нас участие в хактоне было новым опытом, но многие команды занимались этим профессионально, что давало дополнительные преимущества в виде различных заготовок.

Впрочем, победа была не единственной целью, намного важнее было проработать и доказать актуальность идеи для дальнейшей реализации.

Мы так сильно увлеклись подтверждением актуальности идеи, что даже смогли договориться с одним из крупнейших мерчантов в своей отрасли о запуске групповой оплаты.

В конце первого дня у нас появился дизайн пользовательского пути, который мы успешно защитили на менторской сессии.

Мы показали процесс отправки организатором покупки ссылки другим участникам.

И не забыли показать как выглядит отслеживание статуса сбора средств.

Оплата по ссылке максимально удобна. Неважно в каком банке у вас открыта карта, если он подключен к Системе Быстрых Платежей, вы сразу перейдете к оплате без ввода данных карты. Мы также предусмотрели возможность смены способа оплаты на обычную карту.

А еще мерчанты могут самостоятельно выставлять счета в интернет-банке на оплату товара или услугу, добавив возможность разбить счет для оплаты группой покупателей. Актуально для организаторов туров, например.

Второй этап хакатона

Успешно защитив результаты первого дня, мы перешли непосредственно к разработке. Запускать MVP решили на андроиде. Приложение писали на Kotlin, React для веба и API-сервис для отправки sms со ссылками.

В итоге собрали решение, генерирующее ссылки на оплату c отправкой их по sms и перебросом пользователя в приложение банка.

Результаты

Мы заняли шестое место и очень довольны этим результатом. Придумать идею за день до старта, собрать команду, продумать логику, разработать приложение, найти реального клиента(!)— для прототипа это очень круто.

Отдельную благодарность хочу выразить всей команде Райффайзенбанка, на высочайшем уровне организовавшей образцовый хакатон. Это один из немногих крупных банков, который уже даже не банк, а финтех-компания.

По вопросам сотрудничества пишите на адрес ceo@moosehead.ru или сразу в Телеграмм @mostmax. Дизайн и разработка для финтеха и не только.

Это первая статья об истории создания онлайн-банка для бизнеса. Истории, которой я невероятно горжусь и которой хочу поделиться не только с коллегами по финтеху, но и с предпринимателями.

Два года назад я присоединился к команде ФорБанка и возглавил разработку интерфейсов онлайн-сервисов: UX/ UI интернет-банка, мобильных приложений и сайта. Перед нами стояла цель — оцифровать все услуги классического банка, начиная с открытия счета и войти в пятерку онлайн-банков для предпринимателей.

Справка о банке. АО КБ “ФорБанк” работает на рынке с 1992 года и оказывает все виды услуг юридическим и физическим лицам. Девять городов присутствия с главным офисом в Москве. На 1 апреля 2019 банк занимает 228 место по активам и 169-е по размеру чистой прибыли.

В январе 2018 года мы выпустили первую версию интернет-банка, разработав его с нуля за полгода, а летом запустили процесс удаленного открытия расчетного счета. Мы стали четвертым онлайн-банком в стране, работающим с бизнесом дистанционно.

Но началось все с полной смены фирменного стиля.

Причины ребрендинга

Давайте разберемся с самим понятием. Если говорить просто, ребрендинг — это совокупность внутренних и визуальных изменений компании, связанных с новым позиционированием. Вы меняете продукт под нужды новой аудитории, меняете бизнес-процессы и, конечно же, отражаете эти изменения в новом логотипе, слогане и фирменном стиле в целом.

В какой-то момент банк решил стать цифровой платформой, а для этого классическому банку необходимо перестроить свою ДНК, что в корпоративном мире и означает ребрендинг.

“Что тут у нас?”

Не нужно быть маркетологом, чтобы понять актуальность ребрендинга для ФорБанка:

Когда-то подобный логотип и цветовые решения были современными и даже удачными, но — не сегодня.

Обычная практика офлайновых банков в подобных случаях — создание отдельной структуры и вывод цифровой платформы под новым брендом. Но название “ФорБанк” звучало вполне современно, а хорошая репутация зарабатывалась десятилетиями — не было смысла стартовать с нуля.

Магия создания логотипа

Фирменный стиль — это графическое выражение того, чем одна компания отличается от других. Глядя на визуальные элементы вашего бренда, клиенты должны испытывать те эмоции, которые вы хотите у них вызвать.

В основе фирменного стиля лежит логотип. И сейчас я вам покажу, как мы его создавали.

В первую очередь, составили список слов и смыслов, с которыми должен ассоциироваться логотип (а значит и бренд): надежность, оригинальность, современность, честность, целеустремленность, активность, упорность.

Дальше приступаем к визуальной части. Берем букву “Ф” из названия банка и начинаем ее “крутить”:

В какой-то момент увидели, что неудачное начертание похоже на знак бесконечности. Очень сильный символ:

Для знака нужен фон. Мы берем первую часть названия ФорБанк и мозг рождает ассоциацию с цифрой “4". Четверка —это квадрат, квадрат слишком простая фигура для наших продуктов, поэтому берем куб:

А что, если перевернуть куб…

Сота — это тоже очень сильный символ! В природе шестиугольник —одна из самых прочных и вместительных геометрических фигур — максимальный объем при минимальных затратах. Стилизованная под бесконечность “Ф” и самая прочная фигура. Идеальное попадание:

Черновой вариант готов. Отложим его и подберем шрифтовое начертание. Этот процесс не так интересен, вы просто перебираете сотню шрифтов и ищете наиболее подходящий к логотипу. Мы выбрали такой вариант:

Гармоничный гротеск— одновременно, и строгий, и дружелюбный за счет скруглений. Теперь соединяем графическую часть с шрифтовой, добавляем ударение для придания динамики (помним про “активность” и “целеустремленность” в семантическом ядре) и смотрим, что получилось:

Выбор фирменного цвета

Сам логотип оказался настолько удачным, что споров по нему не было вовсе, чего не скажешь о выборе цвета:

Есть несколько цветов, “занятых” крупными банками. Например, если сказать “желтый банк”, все сразу подумают сами знаете про кого. Тоже самое с зеленым, красным и синим. Лично мне понравились два варианта: зелено-желтый градиент и желтый:

Зелено-желтый забраковали за схожесть с цветами одного из онлайн-банков, желтый же пропустили в финал голосования вместе с пламенным и синим:

Наш новый логотип

Решением большинства голосов был выбран огненно-пламенный вариант:

“Огненно-пламенным” мы его назвали не просто так. В поисках лучшего сочетания цветов, наткнулись на это изображение:

Лава превратилась в графическое начертание, пепел перешел в шрифт. Даже молния стала частью фирменного стиля — “холодный белый” для различных фонов:

Новая жизнь

Шаг за шагом, мы начали менять логотип на всех носителях: сайт, вывески, визитки, банковские карты.

Я показал вам десятую часть того, как происходит создание фирменного стиля. Это довольно сложный, но очень увлекательный процесс. Надеюсь, вам тоже было интересно.

Читайте в следующих выпусках:

• Киллер-фича ФорБанка для предпринимателей
• Как мы создавали интернет-банк
• Эволюция открытия расчетных счетов в онлайн-банках
• Развитие сайта и появление первых лендингов

С вопросами и предложениями обращаться сюда: mostovoy.maxim@gmail.com или Телеграм @mostmax