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Snapshot

Two users. Two devices. One transaction.

A multi-year redesign of FNB’s business and enterprise banking platforms, and the one question about entitlements that re-architected every flow we drew afterwards.

Client
FNB
Sector
Business & enterprise banking
Role
Lead UX designer
Year
2018–2020
Status
Shipped countrywide
Client flow for a complex user: a teal capturer track from log in to confirm, and a separate orange authoriser track from notification through to authentication on a second device.

The problem

By 2018 FNB’s business and enterprise platforms had drifted out of step with the consumer banking experience that had won the bank multiple awards. Move from your personal profile to your business one and you met a different visual language, missing functionality and almost no app parity.

The frustration was concrete. One user put it as: “I switch over to my business profile and I am frustrated. The experience is clunky and confusing.”

The obvious fix was consistency. The harder question, and the one that ended up reshaping the project, was consistency for whom?

The call that mattered

The decision

Business users don’t split by company size. They split by the entitlements attached to their profile. So we designed for entitlement, not for org chart.

Simple users held full entitlements: sole proprietors, account principals, anyone who could do anything on the account. Their journey was linear. Log in, complete the task, sign off.

Complex users held partial entitlements, inside the approval hierarchies typical of larger businesses. A bookkeeper captures a payment but cannot authorise it. A finance manager authorises but never initiates. Two people, two roles, two devices, one transaction, often hours apart.

That wasn’t a segmentation exercise for marketing. It was architectural. It meant no transactional journey could be drawn once. Every one had to support a capturer initiating, the action queueing into an authorisation state, an authoriser being notified on a separate device, logging in independently, and authenticating on yet another.

Four core payment workflows, each designed twice. Eight complete flows, anchored in one architectural decision.

The authoriser approval screen, showing the payment awaiting authorisation with a countdown and a fingerprint affordance.
Authorisation, made deliberate A countdown and a fingerprint, so approving someone else’s payment feels like a decision rather than a tap. The capturer never sees the queue mechanics that hand the work over, and the authoriser never sees the capture screens. One transaction, two clean experiences.

What happened

  • 8payment workflows
  • 4designed twice
  • 23month rollout

Rolled out incrementally between January 2019 and November 2020, first to a focus group and then countrywide. The entitlement framework outlasted the redesign and shaped how the team approached transactional flows for years afterwards.

The part I’d carry forward: the reframe was worth more than any screen in it. Asking consistency for whom cost one workshop and saved us from building a platform that worked beautifully for the smallest customers and broke for the biggest.

That’s the compressed version. The dual-track flows and the research behind them are where the detail actually lives.

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