Industry

Fintech

Client

Quipu

From Lean MVP to Scalable Product: Redesigning Renewals for a Growing Fintech

Quipu: AI credit scoring for unbanked micro-businesses in LatAm.

Year

2025

Role

Product Designer (UX/UI)

How we migrated a manual, high-friction renewal flow into the app to improve retention, scalability, and data capture

In a market where underserved entrepreneurs depend on speed to keep their businesses alive, a single friction in the credit renewal process can mean losing trust, losing time or losing a customer. Our renewal flow was working, in the way early-stage, Lean-driven solutions are meant to work: simple, fast to validate, and good enough to unlock early traction. But as Quipu scaled and our monthly credit placements grew exponentially, those early solutions reached their natural limit. What once helped us move fast now needed to evolve into a robust, scalable experience that supported both user trust and operational efficiency. This project marked the shift from validating demand to building long-term product foundations, transforming a functional flow into a strategic engine for retention, automation, and sustainable growth.

Results / Impact

Retention & Repeat Usage – Moving renewals into the app made it easier for existing customers to take a new loan in just a few steps, contributing to a higher share of repeat borrowers in our portfolio.

  • Operational Efficiency – Reduced manual work for operations by automating contract generation and eliminating bulk uploads, freeing the team to focus on exceptions instead of routine cases.

  • Time-to-Decision – Cut the time between “I want to renew” and “my request is processed” by letting users self-serve, instead of waiting for an agent to handle their case.

  • Data for Risk & AI – Each in-app renewal now feeds more consistent and structured data into our credit-risk models, supporting the evolution of alternative scoring.

  • App Adoption – Renewals became a concrete reason to download and use the app, helping reposition it from “nice to have” to a core channel for managing the credit lifecycle.

  1. 70% of users expressed a need for an integrated credit and payment experience within the app. As an MVP, we introduced “Manage my credit” and “Pay” buttons, connected via API to external service providers. This reduced friction and eliminated the need for redirects, streamlining the experience.

  2. We implemented home screen personalization based on user segmentation to improve the multichannel experience, boost engagement, and increase retention. Now, depending on each user’s profile and credit status, the app dynamically displays relevant products and benefits, offering a more contextual and meaningful experience.

Problem

For years, credit renewals were handled outside the app through a web form, WhatsApp, and manual back-office work.
This created a triple friction:

  • For users, who had to repeat the same data they had already given us during onboarding, often through confusing flows and multiple channels.

  • For operations, who depended on bulk uploads and manual contract creation, making it hard to scale as we grew from ~1K to ~4K loans per month.

  • For the business, renewals were treated as an operational patch instead of a strategic lever for retention and data capture.

We needed to turn renewals from “a workaround that sort of works” into a scalable, self-serve experience inside the app.

Project Goals

Make credit renewals self-serve inside the app, reducing dependence on agents and manual processes.

  • Reuse existing user data to avoid asking customers to re-enter information we already have.

  • Decrease operational friction and response times so users don’t “cool off” while waiting.

  • Strengthen the app as the central place for managing loans: renewals, payments, and key information.

  • Capture better structured data for credit-risk models and alternative scoring, without adding friction to the experience.

Role & Collaboration

As the only Product Designer (UX/UI) in the company at that time, I led the end-to-end redesign of the renewal flow for the mobile app. I worked closely with Growth, Risk, Operations, Development, and Customer Support to connect three perspectives: the pain of users, the saturation of the operations team, and the strategic need to grow retention and feed our AI-driven scoring models.

My contribution was to diagnose the problem systemically, simplify the flow for users, and articulate the solution so it could be implemented with our actual technical and time constraints.

  • Facilitation of cross-functional workshops to define requirements, constraints, and MVP scope.

  • Alignment with business, risk, data, legal, and engineering teams.

  • End-to-end UX design: problem diagnosis, user flows, information architecture, validation paths, and edge-case handling.

  • UI design: components, patterns, visual states, and functional handoff for engineering.

  • Continuous research: quick interviews, ticket analysis, and frontline insights from Customer Support.

  • UX Writing: narrative definition, and microcopy,

  • Close collaboration with engineering: development follow-up, functional QA, and release support.

Partial view of the handoff documentation: includes the full user flow with high-fidelity wireframes covering multiple user scenarios, alongside a view of the design system with tokens applied to buttons, text, and surfaces.

Process: Gen AI as a Partner

As the sole owner of the end-to-end design process, UX, UI, alignment with stakeholders, research, and copy. AI tools became key accelerators in my workflow. I used LLMs (ChatGPT, Fireflies, Elicit, Lovable, NotebookLM, Figma AI) for rapid heuristics, content generation aligned with our brand voice, competitive analysis, and fast prototyping.

Research
I started by auditing the existing renewal journey: web form, WhatsApp, manual steps, and internal tools.
I combined:

  • Interviews and calls with customers who had renewed (or tried to), using AI‑assisted transcription and first‑pass summaries to speed up note‑taking while keeping final coding and insight clustering manual.

  • Insights from the Customer Support team (tickets, recurring complaints, friction points), where AI helped group large volumes of tickets into themes that I then validated and prioritized.

  • Conversations with Operations and Risk to understand saturation, bottlenecks and failure modes.

Prioritization
I mapped the “ideal” renewal experience and then negotiated a lean MVP that:

  • Kept the most critical UX improvements (no repeated data, clear next steps, in‑app self‑service).

  • Respected technical capacity and time‑to‑market pressure from business stakeholders, using AI to explore trade‑off scenarios and communicate them more clearly (flows, user stories), while decisions were taken collaboratively with the team.

Design

  • Re‑architected the renewal flow into a single in‑app journey, instead of scattering steps across web, chat, and manual follow‑up; AI tools helped generate alternative flow options and microcopy drafts that I refined for tone, regulation, and brand.

  • Pre‑filled user data we already had, and reduced the renewal to a few key decisions and confirmations, using AI for quick UI variations and state exploration, keeping final interaction patterns consistent with our design system.

  • Aligned UI with the updated brand and the new app structure.

  • Designed the experience with the user in mind, knowing they are often under financial stress and need speed + clarity, not decoration; AI‑generated proposals were treated as options.

Validation & Handoff

  • Iterated the flow with Development, Risk, and Legal to align constraints (KYC, contracts, regulatory copy); AI assisted in drafting and checking variants of legal and error messages that Legal and Risk then reviewed and approved.

  • Prepared the full flow in Figma (screens, states, copy, edge cases) and supported implementation throughout development, using AI to document edge cases, acceptance criteria, and test scenarios more exhaustively.

Learnings

Trade-offs

Speed vs. UX Depth
Prioritizing a fast, Lean launch meant sacrificing broader testing and desirable refinements.

MVP vs. Ideal Experience
We shipped a functional version, knowing that important elements were still missing.

Operational Scalability vs. Time to Polish Details
Aligning with the new credit core enabled automation but reduced the time available to refine edge cases.

Clarity vs. Legal Constraints
We pushed for greater transparency in the narrative, but parts of the process remained rigid due to regulatory constraints.

Cognitive Load vs. Data Needs
Simplifying the experience required balancing how much information we asked for without compromising scoring and fraud models.

Parallel Workstreams vs. Depth in Each Initiative
Managing this redesign alongside the onboarding overhaul required pragmatic decisions about scope and prioritization.

This project strengthened my ability to bring clarity in the middle of uncertainty. Working across Product, Tech, Risk, Data, Legal, and Operations required balancing business urgency, technical constraints, and user needs while advocating for a renewal experience that was simple, transparent, and scalable. I learned to collaborate fluidly with teams moving at different speeds, maintain alignment through workshops and structured communication, and push for human-centered decisions even in a high-pressure lending environment.

Managing this redesign alongside other critical initiatives, such as the full overhaul of the credit application flow, reinforced the importance of prioritization, clear communication, and stakeholder expectation-setting. It deepened my sense of ownership: contributing to collective goals while delivering reliably on my individual responsibilities, negotiating timelines, and adapting to shifting constraints.

As the sole end-to-end designer on the project, AI became a strategic partner in my workflow. I used it to accelerate early heuristics, analyze screenshots, refine copy aligned with our brand voice, prototype faster, and validate concepts through rapid iterations. Instead of replacing the design process, AI amplified my ability to move quickly with rigor, especially in an environment where speed is critical.