Overview

Fintoc is a Chilean fintech that enables instant bank-to-bank payments — no cards, no extra apps. Users pay directly from their bank via a secure link or through the fintoc.me platform.

We were brought in to design a new feature: saving external recipients (non-Fintoc users) to a contacts list. A small-sounding addition that turned out to be a deeper UX challenge than expected.

The Problem

Every time a Fintoc user sent money to someone outside the platform, they had to re-enter that person's bank details. The app didn't store them.

For frequent transfers — rent, splitting bills, paying freelancers — this created real friction. Users were copying and pasting data manually, every single time.

"The app does not store their details. As a result, users must re-enter or paste the recipient's information every time they want to send money again."

Our goal: Let users save external recipients to their contacts list during or after a transfer, making future transactions faster and reducing errors.

Target Audience

Digital-first users who expect seamless money movement:

• Young professionals managing day-to-day P2P transfers

• Freelancers paying or receiving from clients across different banks

These users are comfortable with mobile banking but have low tolerance for repetitive friction.

Research

Existing Flow Audit

We started by mapping the current Fintoc experience end-to-end — from initiating a payment to completion. The existing flow was clean for internal (Fintoc-to-Fintoc) transfers but had a clear gap: once a payment to an external contact was sent, nothing was saved.

Competitor Analysis

We looked at how similar apps handle external contacts and identified key patterns — and failures:

These findings gave us a clear design direction: make saving external contacts feel native to the payment flow, not like an afterthought.

Design Process

Low-Fidelity Exploration

We built low-fi wireframes to quickly test layout ideas before committing to anything. This phase surfaced 6 key design decisions.

Consideration 1 — Payment Page: Tabs or No Tabs?

We explored showing "Fintoc Friends" and "New Contacts" as separate tabs vs. a unified view.

Decision: Remove the tabs from the payment flow. During testing, a user noted: "I'm confused about why I can still toggle between tabs when I'm about to pay someone." The tabs added cognitive load at the wrong moment. We unified the view.

Consideration 2 — Where to Surface Favourite Contacts?

Option A: Show favourites on the Home screen.
Option B: Show favourites on the Payment page.

Decision: Payment page. Showing favourites on Home felt random and out of context. At the moment of payment, a visible shortcut to frequent contacts is immediately useful.

Consideration 3 — How Many Favourites to Show?

Option A: 3 visible, rest scrollable.
Option B: 6 visible at once.

Decision: 3 visible + scroll. Showing 6 cluttered the screen and weakened the visual hierarchy. Limiting to 3 kept the interface clean while still offering access to more via scroll.

Consideration 4 — Bank Details Entry: Overlay or Full Screen?

Option A: Slide-up overlay panel for bank details.
Option B: Full-screen form.

Decision: Full-screen form. Entering sensitive financial data needs focus and clarity. An overlay felt cramped and less trustworthy.

Consideration 5 — Amount Page: One Design or Two?

We had two slightly different "amount" screens — one for external transfers and one for internal transfers. They were almost identical but looked like different pages.

Decision: One unified design. The difference wasn't meaningful to users and added unnecessary inconsistency to the design system.

Consideration 6 — Home Page: Announcement Bubble

The existing home page had labels that visually looked like clickable buttons but weren't. During testing: "I thought the announcement was clickable... what is it for again? Why is there an arrow too?"

Decision: Redesign as a clearly disabled state — no arrow, no deceptive affordance.

Solution

High-Fidelity Design

With decisions locked, we moved to high-fidelity. We worked within Fintoc's existing design system, though we had to rebuild and clean up components — the original library had inconsistencies in how properties were organised.

We improved the component library structure before building screens, which made the hi-fi phase faster and more consistent.

Key Screens Designed

• Payment page with favourites strip (3 visible, scrollable) and unified contact view

• External contact entry form (full-screen, step-by-step bank detail input)

• Save recipient prompt triggered post-transfer with a single CTA

• Contacts list showing internal and external recipients with clear visual differentiation

• Home page with corrected announcement state (no false affordance)

  
  Prototype

  An interactive prototype was built and demoed, covering the full flow:

  initiating a payment → encountering an unknown external recipient → entering bank details → completing the transfer → being prompted to save the contact → confirming and seeing them in the contacts list.

  
  

  

  
  

  What I Learned

  
  

  This project reinforced a few things I keep coming back to:

  Scope creep is a design problem, not just a project management one. When we started exploring multiple solutions, each opened new rabbit holes. The discipline came in recognising when exploration was useful and when it was avoidance.

  Small features touch the whole system. Adding an "external contacts" feature meant touching the payment page, home page, component library, and data entry flow. Nothing is ever just one screen.

  Working within someone else's design system is a real skill. You're not free to solve problems however you want — you have to solve them in a way that fits what already exists. Sometimes the right move is to improve the system itself before building on top of it

  
  

  Tools Used

  
  

  Figma · FigJam · Competitor Analysis · Low-fi Prototyping · Component Library Audit

  
  

  Fintoc is a real Chilean fintech platform. This project was a design challenge to extend their existing product experience.