The app had been designed by the engineering team that built it, which meant every screen reflected the system's internal logic rather than a new customer's mental model. A prototype built this way can function correctly and still fail its users, and that is what usability testing found: every critical flow, from opening an account to everyday money management, broke down when a real customer tried to use it unaided.

Regulatory requirements made the problem harder to fix by trial and error. Every screen in a banking flow carries compliance obligations, so redesigning without a clear method risked solving the usability problem while creating a regulatory one. Meanwhile the bank was trying to compete with established neobanks that customers already trusted, with a prototype that had not yet earned that trust in its own usability testing.

We replaced internal assumptions with external evidence. 18 user interviews established what customers actually needed from a banking app, and benchmarking against 8 established neobanks showed where the competitive bar already sat. That combination gave the redesign a target grounded in customer expectations rather than in the system architecture the original prototype had inherited.

Every core flow was then rebuilt around three principles: progressive disclosure so customers saw only what a given step required, contextual compliance disclosures placed at the moment a decision needed them rather than bundled into a wall of terms, and plain-language writing throughout so financial and regulatory concepts read clearly to a first-time user. Four rounds of prototype testing validated each flow before it was considered finished.