Rebranding an Online Bank for 20 Million Users

From zero documentation to a fully launched design system — leading a team of 7 to rebrand 40+ features across 5 web applications in under 4 months.
  • Company
  • July 2024 – March 2025 Launched: March 2025
  • Role
  • Lead Product Designer Design System Interaction Designer Project Manager
  • Devices
  • Web Resposive (mobile, tablet and desktop)
  • Duration
  • Figma

OVERVIEW

Banamex serves 20 million users.
Their bill payment flow hadn't kept up.

When Banamex separated from Citibank, it triggered a full brand renewal across all digital channels. I led the rebranding implementation for BancaNet — the online banking platform — building the Roseta Design System for web from scratch and guiding a team of 7 designers to ship a modernised experience for over 20 million users, on schedule.

PROBLEMS

Three compounding problems, one broken experience.

🏚️

A forgotten product

Outdated UI patterns, no component library, and significant usability debt accumulated while the mobile app took all the investment and attention.

📂

No documentation

A Sketch-to-Figma migration and years of prioritzsing mobile had left BancaNet with almost no surviving feature documentation. There was no single source of truth.

⚙️

Technical constraints

BancaNet runs on legacy systems that limit what can be shipped. Innovation had to happen within real engineering constraints, requiring constant collaboration with the dev team throughout.

SOLUTION

Key features create one coherent experience.

We introduced features built around a single goal: make bill payments faster, clearer, and less error-prone.

One-time payment

QR / Barcode scanning

Biller catalog with smart search

Saved services hub

Due today
Urgent badge state

3 days left
Push notification sent

7+ days left
Upcoming reminder

DESIGN PROCESS

From research to a shipped product


Discovery

Ideation

Definition

Design

Prototype + Testing

Hand-Off
· User research
· Stakeholder interviews
· Benchmarking
· Heuristics
· HMW sessions
· Feature mapping
· Concept sketches
· Low-fi prototype
· Stakeholder validation
· MVP scoping
· IA
· Components
· High-fidelity
· Prototyping
· Card sorting
· Usability testing
· Iteration
· Dev follow-up
· QA
· Launch war room

Research and analysis

Ideation – How might we...?

Discovery insights were reframed as HMW questions to open up the solution space before any screen was drawn.
H M W
Reduce human error while entering the biller's reference number?
H M W
Restructure the flow for a one-payment experience?
H M W
Create a functional and intuitive biller search for 70+ services?
H M W
Help users not forget their payment due dates?
H M W
Give users quicker access to saved services?
H M W
Help users find their reference number on their receipt?

Definition – Information Architecture

Redundant screens were removed and the flow restructured around two clear paths: one-time payment and saved services.

Testing – Card Sorting + Usability

Open and closed card sorting (research tool Maze) established the 9-chip catalog hierarchy.

HAND - OFF

The work doesn't stop at handoff

After several iterations and some last minute (very impactful changes to perfectly align with all stakeholders) I handed-off the project and ran a developer walkthrough, documented every user action in an analytics tagging table, joined engineering standups to resolve edge cases in real time, reviewed demo builds for design fidelity, and joined the launch war room on ship day.

Shipping at Banamex's scale means the designer stays in the loop until the feature is live and working.

IMPACT

Real numbers, real money, real people

50%
Reduction in interaction cost,
from 12 clicks to 6
410K
Successful transactions
in the first 3 months
$295M
MXN processed through
the redesigned flow
<30s
Time to pay a saved service,
just three taps

LEARNINGS

What I learned building this

🔌
API constraints shaped design decisions

Several features were cut because the APIs weren't ready. The lesson: design ambitiously, but document constraints clearly so deprioritized ideas can ship later — and most of them did.

🧩
Early cross-functional buy-in changes everything

Bringing product, engineering, and legal in from the start — not just at review gates — meant fewer late surprises and faster decisions when priorities shifted.

💬
Feedback culture is a design tool

Creating consistent space for peers and managers to critique openly led to stronger iteration.

📏
The handoff is part of the design

The gap between a polished prototype and a pixel-accurate shipped product is real. Staying involved through standups, demos, and the launch war room is what closes it.

Rebranding an Online Bank for 20 Million Users

From zero documentation to a fully launched design system — leading a team of 7 to rebrand 40+ features across 5 web applications in under 4 months.
  • Year
  • July 2024 – March 2025 Launched: March 2025
  • Role
  • Lead Product Designer Design System Interaction Designer Project Manager
  • Devices
  • Web Resposive (mobile, tablet and desktop)
  • Design tools
  • Figma

OVERVIEW

A separation from Citibank.
A chance to rebuild everything.

When Banamex separated from Citibank, it triggered a full brand renewal across all digital channels. I led the rebranding implementation for BancaNet — the online banking platform — building the Roseta Design System for web from scratch and guiding a team of 7 designers to ship a modernised experience for over 20 million users, on schedule.

PROBLEMS

Three problems that had to be solved before design could begin.

🏚️

A forgotten product

Outdated UI patterns, no component library, and significant usability debt accumulated while the mobile app took all the investment and attention.

📂

No documentation

A Sketch-to-Figma migration and years of prioritzsing mobile had left BancaNet with almost no surviving feature documentation. There was no single source of truth.

⚙️

Technical constraints

BancaNet runs on legacy systems that limit what can be shipped. Innovation had to happen within real engineering constraints, requiring constant collaboration with the dev team throughout.

SOLUTION

A new design system. A fully rebranded product.

Before & after — the same product, rebuilt

01 · Login

Before
After

The entry point to the new brand — the first screen millions of users see. Redesigned to reflect Banamex's new visual identity from the first interaction.

02 · Dashboard

Before
After

The command centre of BancaNet, rebuilt with the new component library to surface account information clearly and consistently across all user types.

03 · Account Detail

Before
After

A complete reimagining of how users view and manage their accounts — modernised visual hierarchy, updated data display patterns, and full design system compliance.

04 · Transfers & payments

Before
After

One of the highest-traffic flows in BancaNet — redesigned for clarity and speed while navigating the technical constraints of legacy transaction infrastructure.

05 · Investments

Before
After

A data-dense feature requiring careful information hierarchy to remain accessible to non-expert users under the new visual system.

06 · Offers

Before
After

Often overlooked, but critical to brand consistency — every corner of BancaNet needed to reflect the new identity, including configuration and session flows.

DESIGN PROCESS

Eight months of parallel workstreams.


Documentation

Design System

UI Iteration

Screen Recration

Hand-off

Launch
· UX audit
· Feature map
· Prioritisation
· Batch planning
· Token architecture
· Atomic components
· Web library
· Strategic screens
· Templates
· Approval process
· 7-designer team
· 200+ screens + Responsiveness
· Staged batches
· Dev follow-up
· QA sessions
· Pre-prod review
· Fix Inconsistencies
· Ship day

Before designing anything, the product had to be found.

With no surviving documentation, discovery became an act of reconstruction. I reviewed archived Sketch files, interviewed colleagues who had worked on BancaNet previously, and explored the platform using my own account to map undocumented flows. The output was a full UX audit — a single source of truth that had never previously existed.

Once documented, features were prioritised using a UX Prioritisation Matrix (Impact vs. Effort) and grouped into delivery batches with defined hand-off dates.

IMPACT ↑
Quick wins
Strategic projects
Fill-ins
Reconsider
EFFORT →

Building the Roseta Design System for web

Interbrand designed Banamex's new brand identity, now, my work was to translate it into a working digital system before screens could be rebuilt. Using the mobile design system as a reference, I applied reverse engineering and atomic design principles to construct a new web component library from scratch — running Q&A and shadowing sessions with design system specialists throughout.

Screen recreation at scale

Once approved, a team of 7 designers joined to recreate 200+ screens across 40+ features — implementing components and templates built during the system phase. A key discovery mid-process: web design is responsive, which added a significant layer of work absorbed without extending the timeline.

Handoff, follow-up & launch

Rather than handing off complete flows, the team handed off strategic screens in batches to meet timelines. This created ambiguity for developers and QA, so designers joined follow-up sessions to answer questions directly — sessions that also uncovered additional undocumented features.

We launched on time, February 26, 2025, prior to this, all stakeholders reviewed pre-shipment and pre-production environments for design fidelity and functionality. On ship day, the full design team walked through the live product together — logging an inconsistencies file with evidence to prioritise fixes immediately after launch.

IMPACT

On schedule. At scale. Built to last.

5
Web applications rebranded with the Roseta Design System
40+
User flows redesigned across BancaNet
172+
New components — now the standard for all future web development
40%
Faster screen recreation through structured templates and system

DESIGN PROCESS

What leading this project taught me.

🔌
Invest upfront in stakeholder alignment

The approval process involved four distinct stakeholder groups with different priorities. Time spent aligning them early — through the right channels, with the right people in the room — paid back in faster decisions later.

🧩
Documentation is a design deliverable

Starting from nothing taught me that a living source of truth is as important as the screens themselves. The audit I built from scratch became the foundation the entire project ran on.

💬
Done is better than perfect — with evidence

Not everything could be resolved before launch. Accepting that — while documenting what remained — meant the team shipped on time and the inconsistencies file gave engineering a clear, prioritised path forward.

📏
Constraints are creative inputs

Legacy systems forced closer collaboration with developers than a greenfield project would have. That friction produced a more grounded, technically realistic design system — one that actually shipped.

Rebranding an Online Bank for 20 Million Users

From zero documentation to a fully launched design system — leading a team of 7 to rebrand 40+ features across 5 web applications in under 4 months.
  • Company
  • July 2024 – March 2025 Launched: March 2025
  • Role
  • Lead Product Designer Design System Interaction Designer Project Manager
  • Devices
  • Web Resposive (mobile, tablet and desktop)
  • Duration
  • Figma

OVERVIEW

Millions of transactions.
One broken moment: "I don't recognize this charge."

When Banamex separated from Citibank, it triggered a full brand renewal across all digital channels. I led the rebranding implementation for BancaNet — the online banking platform — building the Roseta Design System for web from scratch and guiding a team of 7 designers to ship a modernised experience for over 20 million users, on schedule.

PROBLEMS

Three compounding problems,
one overloaded support team.

🏚️

A forgotten product

Outdated UI patterns, no component library, and significant usability debt accumulated while the mobile app took all the investment and attention.

📂

No documentation

A Sketch-to-Figma migration and years of prioritzsing mobile had left BancaNet with almost no surviving feature documentation. There was no single source of truth.

⚙️

Technical constraints

BancaNet runs on legacy systems that limit what can be shipped. Innovation had to happen within real engineering constraints, requiring constant collaboration with the dev team throughout.

In other words...

77%

of customers struggle to identify their own transactions in the app.

73%

choose to call the CAT when unsure about a charge.

1 in 4

CAT calls about unrecognized charges end in confusion — not actual fraud.

Current state when the project kicked off — no merchant context, no visual anchors, no way to self-resolve.

SOLUTION

Information that turns a mystery charge,
into a recognizable purchase.

With no surviving documentation, discovery became an act of reconstruction. I reviewed archived Sketch files, interviewed colleagues who had worked on BancaNet previously, and explored the platform using my own account to map undocumented flows. The output was a full UX audit — a single source of truth that had never previously existed.

Once documented, features were prioritised using a UX Prioritisation Matrix (Impact vs. Effort) and grouped into delivery batches with defined hand-off dates.

DESIGN PROCESS

From a confusing processor string to
a recognized purchase — in five steps.

  • Benchmark — We looked everywhere before drawing anything

    We mapped how transaction data was presented across traditional banking apps, international neobanks, and non-banking platforms with strong receipt experiences.

    1. · Traditional domestic banks provided almost no merchant context.
    2. · International
      digital wallets
      like Apple Pay were richer — but surfacing precise location introduced a cultural nuance: in our market, it could feel intrusive rather than helpful.
    3. · Apps like Rappi and Amazon showed how a receipt-style view builds confidence without creating anxiety.
  • Workshop — Five teams. One whiteboard. The first sketches.

    We brought together stakeholders from business, acquisition, product, design, and technology teams in a cross-functional Design Thinking oriented workshop. Using sticky notes, iPad sketches, paper wireframes, and dot-voting, teams aligned on which data elements were both technically viable and user-valuable, bringing to the table ideas, concerns, agurments and counter-aguments on how to build an experience that benefits the bank and, of course, the user.  

    The session produced the first rough sketches of an enriched transaction card — and surfaced critical constraints around what Ethoca's merchant data network could and couldn't provide at launch.

  • Use cases — Not all transactions are equal. The design had to handle all of them.

    Three distinct use cases shaped the new feature:

  • User Testing — We put two versions in front of users. The data told us which won.

    We ran moderated user testing sessions with three core objectives:

    🔀   A/B testing

    Baseline (raw string) vs. enriched design, measuring recognition speed and user confidence
    👁️   Behavioral observation

    Understanding what actions users take when they genuinely can't identify a charge
    📝   Content validation

    Testing whether label copy ("Merchant", "Establishment", "Commerce") resonated or created new confusion

MVP

We designed six features. Four made it to launch.

The MVP successfully introduced merchant logos, clean commerce names, merchant contact information, and a redesigned transaction list and detail views — giving users the context to recognize their own purchases without picking up the phone. A real step forward from screens that previously showed nothing but a processor string.

Never the less, the design package was larger, it included three additional features — transaction location, a digital receipt, and spend categories. None of them made it to launch. That's just how shipping works sometimes. The features that didn't make it aren't failures — they're an honest record of how the project evolved and what the team learned along the way.

What didn't ship?
Three features designed.
Three different reasons they didn't launch.

📍 Transaction location
Cut from roadmap

Research surfaced a security concern specific to our market: users worried that location history could expose their movement patterns if their phone was stolen. Unlike international neobanks where this data is standard, it created anxiety rather than confidence. It was removed from the roadmap entirely — the concern wasn't one design iteration could resolve.

🧾 Digital Receipt
Deprioritized — API constraints

During development, the team discovered the Ethoca API had more significant constraints than initially scoped — making itemized receipt data unavailable across all merchant types. With a fixed launch date and limited engineering headcount, a partial solution wasn't viable. The feature was deprioritized with no formal future commitment made at the time.

📂 Spend categories
Dropped — data partner taxonomy

When the Ethoca team shared their category taxonomy, the labels were either too technical for everyday users or exceeded the chip component's character limit. Remapping them to a simpler set would have required additional coordination with the data partner — scope the team couldn't absorb before launch. The feature was dropped rather than ship a confusing or truncated version.

IMPACT

Fewer calls. More confidence.
Support reserved for real problems.

↓ Fewer confusion-driven CAT calls
Contextual merchant data gave users the information to identify charges on their own — eliminating the most preventable source of support volume.
↑ Higher transaction recognition rate
Significantly improved identification in A/B testing compared to the raw-string baseline — users could match transactions to purchases at a glance.
↑ Greater user confidence
Users reported higher peace of mind when reviewing account activity with logos and clean merchant names visible alongside their charges.
→ Real disputes finally surfaced
With confusion filtered out, support contacts increasingly represent genuine fraud cases — improving resolution quality across the board.

LEARNINGS

What I learned building this

🗺️
Sociocultural context is a design constraint

Features that feel neutral in one market can feel intrusive in another. International benchmarks were valuable references — but not templates. Location data that builds trust for a Revolut user raised security concerns for ours. Design has to account for what "normal" means to the specific user, not the general pattern.

🔀
Design for data variability, not just the ideal state

The most important design decision wasn't the enriched view — it was the fallback. When Ethoca data isn't available, the experience still has to feel intentional. Designing the degraded states with the same care as the hero states is what makes a system feel polished at scale.

🧩
Early cross-functional buy-in changes everything

Bringing product, engineering, and external partners in from the workshop stage — not just at review gates — meant fewer surprises when the Ethoca data coverage constraints emerged. Problems discovered together get solved faster.

⌨️
Content is part of the interaction design

Whether to label a merchant as "Commerce", "Merchant", or "Establishment" wasn't a copywriting detail — it was a usability question. The A/B testing revealed that label choice materially affected how users interpreted and trusted the information on screen.

Rebranding an Online Bank for 20 Million Users

From zero documentation to a fully launched design system — leading a team of 7 to rebrand 40+ features across 5 web applications in under 4 months.
  • Company
  • July 2024 – March 2025 Launched: March 2025
  • Role
  • Lead Product Designer Design System Interaction Designer Project Manager
  • Methodologies
  • Web Resposive (mobile, tablet and desktop)
  • Duration
  • Figma

OVERVIEW

UP