Skiply

The new Skiply had to work for a whole family, not just the person making a payment. Parents needed control over education and family spending, while children needed a much simpler way to access and understand their own money.

With little recent research to inherit, I started with stakeholder interviews, competitor research and the existing product. We looked at modern fintech products, mapped how education payments worked in the UAE and used usability testing throughout the project to validate key decisions.

The biggest change was moving away from a marketplace built around individual payments. We introduced the family wallet as the core of the product, bringing education, children, budgets, cards and everyday family finances into one connected experience.

A lot of the old experience was dictated by technical constraints and legacy banking processes. I worked closely with the team to challenge those constraints whenever they hurt the experience, rather than simply designing around them. In one case, this helped us reduce a 32-screen registration journey to 12.

We rebuilt the product experience and visual language almost from the ground up. The result brought wallet management, education payments, family members, budgets and financial controls together in an interface that felt much closer to a modern fintech product than the Skiply we started with.

Skiply needed its own identity while still living inside the Rakbank ecosystem. I built a design system that reused shared foundations where it made sense, while introducing Skiply-specific components, patterns and visual rules that gave the team a clear foundation for future work.

I also helped shape how Skiply looked outside the product, from marketing communications to imagery and branded materials. As AI became part of our visual workflow, I documented the tools, prompts and principles behind it so the team could reproduce the style consistently rather than rely on individual designers.

The project gave Skiply much more than a new interface. We established a new product direction, rebuilt the core experience and created the systems and visual foundations the team could continue using as Skiply expanded into new features and products.

From fall 2025 to summer 2026, our IT transformation program received more than 25 industry awards.

One of my biggest takeaways was that good fintech design often means questioning what is presented as a technical limitation. Some constraints are real, but others are inherited decisions. Keeping the conversation focused on the user helped us distinguish between the two and build a much better product.