Xapo is a 100% remote digital banking alternative built on top of Bitcoin, accepting more than 150 currencies and enabling global money transfers in real time. In 2014, Xapo was the first company to issue a Bitcoin debit card. Today, Xapo operates as a fully-fledged digital bank in Gibraltar.

I joined as a Senior Product Designer in 2018 to lead the web app. As mobile became the priority, I took on the Money-in/Money-out flows — adding, transferring, and withdrawing money — across iOS, Android, and web.

In 2019, with the design team grown to nine, I became team lead.

The Money-in/Money-out flows are the moments where users decide whether they trust a financial product. They're also where compliance, UX, and regional payment infrastructure collide.

• Redesigned the web app from the ground up.
• Redesigned the iOS and Android top-up and withdrawal flows for faster transfers and clearer error states.
• Built the first version of the design system for mobile and web, and the workflow for the team to maintain it.

Leading a team of nine designers across timezones in a fully remote company meant the bottleneck was rarely talent. It was process — how decisions got made, how work got handed to engineering, and how quality stayed consistent across designers who never met in person.

• Introduced a prioritization framework that other product teams later adopted.
• Set up a temporary Design Review stage to mentor designers and improve hand-off quality before it became a structural problem.
• Worked with PMs to define measurable goals (KPIs) for the Add Money and onboarding flows, so design decisions had a target instead of an opinion.
• Created guidelines for combining quantitative and qualitative data in design, using A/B testing and UX research as standard practice.