Designing a cross-border financial product from the ground up

I owned the product design experience across Maple Pay Exchange, working from the initial product requirements through the customer journeys and operational surfaces. My work covered the end-to-end financial experience rather than a single feature: onboarding, verification, wallets, funding, exchange, transfers, profile management and the supporting admin experience.

I worked closely with the product and engineering team to translate complex requirements, regulatory constraints and transaction rules into an experience that remained understandable to users.

Maple Pay Exchange is a cross-border financial product built around CAD and NGN money movement, with support for multi-currency wallets, FX conversion, wallet funding and a broader remittance experience.

The product also needed to support identity verification, BVN requirements, payment integrations, transaction records, support workflows and future expansion into additional currencies.

The product documentation defines a broad MVP surface spanning onboarding, login/security, wallet management, exchange, funding, rewards, referrals, support, notifications and profile/settings.

The challenge was not simply to design a banking-style interface. Maple Pay had to connect several complex systems into one understandable customer journey.

A user could move from account creation into identity verification, create or access wallets, fund an account, convert currencies and complete a transfer — each with its own requirements, validation states and failure conditions.

The experience needed to feel simple on the surface without hiding the rules underneath.

Because Maple Pay spans multiple financial tasks, the experience needed a clear relationship between onboarding, wallets, funding, exchange, transactions and account management.

I used the broader product architecture to make sure individual flows felt connected rather than behaving like separate features.

The first experience had to establish trust while collecting the information required to operate a regulated financial account. The onboarding flow moves through phone verification, email verification, personal details, password/security setup and profile tailoring before identity verification unlocks full access.

The brief also requires users to retain entered information when moving backward through the flow so they do not have to repeatedly re-enter data.

The core of Maple Pay is the movement of money between currencies, wallets and beneficiaries. I designed the experience around a clear sequence: know the balance, choose the currency, enter the amount, understand the rate and fee, select the destination, review the transaction and confirm.

The product needed to make the relationship between wallets, funding and exchange clear. Users could fund their CAD or NGN wallet, see their resulting balance and then use that balance for conversion or transfer.

The documented funding flows include Interac-based CAD funding and bank-transfer funding for NGN, with source-name matching and wallet confirmation.

The product was designed with future currency expansion in mind. That meant the wallet experience couldn't assume that CAD and NGN would always be the only currencies a user could interact with.

The structure needed to support currency-specific verification, wallet creation and country representation without creating a completely different experience for every new market.

The product documentation explicitly supports creating multiple currency wallets, with country, currency and flag representations and currency-specific KYC requirements.

Financial transactions need more than a success screen. Users need a clear record of what happened, while support and operations teams need enough information to investigate issues.

The transaction experience therefore connected confirmation, receipts, transaction history and a unique transaction reference that could be used across customer and operational workflows.

The documentation defines transaction IDs as a common reference across receipts, user communication, audit logs and support/reconciliation.

A cross-border financial product cannot rely on the happy path. I designed the experience around insufficient balances, unavailable rates, verification requirements and transactions that need additional review.

The documented exchange flow explicitly accounts for insufficient balance, unavailable exchange rates and compliance holds.

The product required close collaboration because many UX decisions depended on how the underlying financial rules worked. I used product requirements, system constraints and engineering feedback to refine the experience instead of designing the interface in isolation.

The experience evolved through refinement of information hierarchy, transaction states, verification requirements and the relationship between wallets, funding and exchange.

The work established a clearer customer experience for a cross-border financial product and created a foundation that could support money movement, multi-currency wallets, verification and future product expansion as one connected system.

Designing a financial product from the ground up changed how I think about complexity. The difficult part is rarely the screen itself; it is understanding how rules, states, systems and user expectations connect across the journey.

This project strengthened my ability to design across an entire financial ecosystem rather than treating each flow as an isolated feature.