Financial product design keeps repeating the same mistakes.
Every fintech team reinvents the same patterns. How should onboarding flow for a savings product? What does a trustworthy transaction confirmation look like? How do you present portfolio performance without triggering panic? These questions have answers — answers that exist in the best-performing products in the world — but there's no structured place to find them.
After a decade working across Luno (crypto), Allan Gray (investment), The Baymard Institute (ecommerce and financial UX auditing), and numerous client engagements, I found myself carrying an enormous amount of tacit knowledge about global financial product conventions. The database is my attempt to make that knowledge explicit.
What gets documented.
The database captures UX patterns, interaction norms, and design conventions across five categories of financial product: banking apps, crypto wallets, investment platforms, savings products, and money transfer. For each pattern, the entry records what the convention is, why it exists, where it works, where it breaks down, and which products execute it best.
Building the evidence base.
Each entry in the database is grounded in three sources: direct observation from live product audits, user research findings from my decade of testing and interviewing across financial contexts, and benchmark analysis comparing how different products in the same category approach the same challenge.
The benchmark analysis is particularly valuable. When ten different savings apps all make the same design decision, that's a convention worth understanding. When one app does something radically different and it works, that's a pattern worth documenting carefully — because it tells you something the consensus missed.
Knowledge that travels.
The database is designed to be used in three ways. As a research tool at the start of a project — instead of starting from scratch, you pull the relevant patterns and understand the conventions you're working within before you design anything. As a critique framework during design — checking decisions against established conventions and articulating why you're following or departing from them. And as a client communication tool — when recommending a change to a fintech product team, grounding the recommendation in a documented pattern makes it a design decision, not an opinion.