Redefining how Zopa customers manage, understand, and execute payments across a growing suite of financial products.
With the launch of our current account on the horizon, this initiative became a top priority due to its potential to significantly shape the overall user experience. While the proposed solution needed to benefit all users, our core focus was on multi-product users — those expected to interact more frequently with payment features following the introduction of the current account.
For these users, payments were becoming a central part of their financial journey, and it was critical that we designed an experience that was efficient, seamless, and intuitive. The project aimed to streamline the end-to-end payment flow, ensuring users could manage their transactions effortlessly while reinforcing trust and confidence in Zopa.
The current account launch created a step-change in how customers would interact with Zopa. Payments could no longer be an afterthought — they needed to be a first-class experience.
To ensure we delivered meaningful impact, we defined clear KPIs to measure success from the outset.
Before picking up a pen, we needed to deeply understand how and why customers make payments. Our research focused on two core areas.
Understanding how customer payment habits are formed, why customers have the routines they have, and what challenges they encounter day to day.
Identifying patterns of behaviour behind customer actions, investigating external factors that surface the why, and understanding the assumptions customers hold when completing payment jobs.
To design an intuitive and market-leading payment experience, I conducted a comprehensive competitive analysis focusing on both incumbent and challenger banks. The goal was to understand how the industry approaches payment flows, identify best practices, and uncover gaps and opportunities where we could differentiate.
I mapped the navigation structures and payment jobs enabled by Barclays, Santander, Lloyds, Natwest, and First Direct — looking at how each organised their information architecture and what tasks they surfaced most prominently.
A key pattern emerged: challenger banks were significantly better at surfacing payment context and giving users a sense of control — while incumbent banks still held an edge in trust. The opportunity was clear.
As part of defining the optimal payments experience, I explored the different "jobs" that incumbent and challenger banks were enabling for their users. The goal was to understand what problems they were solving, where they were adding value, and where gaps existed — informing what jobs we should focus on at a foundation level.
I needed to understand the existing landscape within the current Zopa app. This involved mapping out all payment-related jobs across our different products. The goal was to identify what tasks users were performing, how frequently they were doing them, and how well our current IA supported those journeys.
Alongside this, I mapped the existing information architecture to understand how payment actions were distributed across products and whether users were required to jump between multiple journeys to achieve simple goals.
To ensure we gathered consistent, valuable insights, I created a structured discussion guide tailored to our goal of defining the optimal payments experience. The guide acted as a framework to steer conversations while leaving room for users to share unexpected insights about their behaviours, frustrations, and needs.
Customers prioritise understanding the purpose and significance of payments, categorising them by intent (bills, daily spending, subscriptions). Preferences vary, with some favouring automation while others seek manual control.
Customers prefer streamlined payment processes, emphasising simplicity and efficiency. Some express dissatisfaction with existing banking apps, citing challenges in navigation and frustration with multi-step processes.
Customers value clear visibility into transactions and categorised spending, especially for essential and non-essential expenses. They expect streamlined processes within current account cards or payment tabs.
The Payments tab is perceived by customers as a centralised control centre — indicating a distinct preference for holistic payment management rather than merely transaction execution.
To complement the qualitative insights from user interviews, I designed and conducted a quantitative survey aimed at gathering a broader understanding of user behaviours, perceptions, and challenges around payments within banking apps.
A significant portion of users rely on banking apps to organise transactions. Most find it helpful to have payments sorted and categorised, providing clearer insights into spending habits.
Users prefer to see automatic monthly payments grouped by payment type, surfacing an opportunity to streamline the management of recurring transactions.
The majority of users report a positive impact on their financial wellbeing when using Zopa — attributed to feelings of control, convenience, organisation, and achieving financial goals.
Users want to efficiently categorise their payments by intent, making the process intuitive and engaging for better financial understanding.
Users seek a central hub within the "Payments" tab to empower financial decisions, providing a comprehensive platform for understanding transactions.
Users need an efficient categorisation system that automatically organises payments into clear and relevant categories, saving time and effort.
Users want the ability to anticipate potential financial fluctuations based on payment history and simulate the impact of upcoming payments on their balance.
Users desire the ability to drill down into detailed insights for each payment, including transaction purpose, past history, and future projections.
Users aspire to have the "Payments" tab actively guide them in their financial decisions and money moves, not just report on them.
Taking the insights from user interviews, surveys, and card sorting, I translated our findings into a data-informed persona that captured the behaviours, goals, and pain points of our core users. Rather than creating a static deliverable, this persona served as a living reference point for the team — a tool to align stakeholders, guide design decisions, and keep us grounded in real user needs.
We called her the "Financial Navigator" — someone who actively steers through their financial journey, making deliberate decisions rather than passively observing what happens to their money.
To be successful in delivering an optimal payments experience, it required cross-functional alignment. The insights we uncovered during research touched multiple areas of the business, meaning no single team could deliver impact in isolation.
To address this, I brought together product teams from across the organisation and ran a collaborative workshop focused on context sharing, ownership mapping, and action planning. This workshop aligned stakeholders on priorities, ownership, and next steps, creating a shared understanding of where effort should be focused to deliver the highest impact.
Building on the alignment, I ensured there were actionable deliverables that multiple product teams could use to inform their roadmaps. I collaborated closely with each team to prioritise insights and determine which payment jobs needed to be addressed immediately versus those that could be tackled later.
Where jobs were deprioritised for now, I facilitated discussions around downstream impacts on other teams to ensure dependencies were well understood and managed.
For the current account launch, I partnered with the product team to define the MVP payment jobs and establish the correct entry points within the app to support a seamless user experience. This alignment resulted in a finalised table of prioritised MVP jobs, giving all product teams a shared reference point to drive consistency and focus across the business.
Redefining the payments experience was one of the most cross-functional and research-driven projects I've led to date. It required balancing user needs, business priorities, and technical constraints while collaborating with multiple product teams across the organisation.
Combining user interviews, surveys, and card sorting allowed us to deeply understand user behaviours, pain points, and mental models around payments. These insights directly shaped the information architecture and prioritisation of MVP jobs.
By running collaborative workshops and creating clear deliverables, I was able to bring multiple product teams together and establish shared ownership of the payments vision.
Defining core payment jobs and agreeing on entry points across products gave us a focused roadmap and ensured the current account launch delivered a cohesive experience.
The work not only improved the immediate payment experience but laid the groundwork for a future-proofed, centralised payments hub.
With the current account launch deadline, we had to deliver impact quickly while ensuring our design decisions were grounded in solid insights.
One of the biggest learnings was just how disconnected existing payment flows were across products. Addressing this highlighted the need for a holistic, app-wide strategy rather than isolated feature fixes.
This project not only defined the optimal payments experience, but delivered a prioritised set of MVP jobs that all product teams could point to. It influenced a new payments architecture based on real user behaviours, while setting a precedent for how we approach multi-product journeys in the future. It created a strong foundation for scaling the app's payment ecosystem, ensuring our customers have a faster, more familiar, and more intuitive experience when managing their money.
The biggest outcome wasn't a single screen or feature. It was a shared understanding across the business of what the payments experience needed to be — and why.