One platform, many brands: product design for Netspend prepaid banking

Challenge

Prepaid banking serves the people traditional banks leave behind: self-banked customers who run their lives in cash and cannot afford opaque fees or clumsy tools. At Netspend, a fintech leader in prepaid debit with 200M+ accounts and $1T+ processed, the mobile app had to make the basics (getting paid, checking a balance, loading a check) feel effortless, for millions of cardholders and a dozen brand partners at once.

Approach

As Senior Product Designer (2017 to 2021) I worked across the core mobile banking experience: balances and transactions, direct deposit, sending money, mobile check load through the camera, and the reload-location map. I redesigned the onboarding UX to cut sign-up friction, and worked within the white-label design system that shipped this same platform as branded apps for PlayStation, 7-Eleven, Brink's, MLB, PayPal, and Western Union.

Impact

The redesigned onboarding drove registration growth that contributed to multi-million dollar revenue gains. The platform moved $34.5 billion in gross dollar volume across 5 million active cards in 2018, with half of active cardholders trusting it with their paycheck via direct deposit, and the app passed 5 million installs on Google Play. When pandemic stimulus went out in 2020, Netspend disbursed more than $1.4 billion in CARES Act funds: exactly the moment when this kind of design has to work.

Product Design Mobile Banking

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