UI/UX Lead - Digital Financial Products

JOB DESCRIPTION

UI/UX Lead

Digital Financial Products

LOCATION
Gurgaon

REPORTS TO
Head of Design Vertical

FUNCTION
Digital Experience Design

ROLE MODEL
Senior individual contributor / design lead

Role Overview :

We are looking for an experienced UI/UX Lead to own the end-to-end design of assigned digital financial product use cases, including loans, overdrafts, savings, cards, payments, and new propositions introduced as our digital portfolio evolves.

The role will set the experience vision across mobile app, responsive web, WhatsApp, conversational interfaces, partner journeys, and emerging digital touchpoints. The UI/UX Lead will combine customer insight, interaction design, visual craft, and commercial understanding to make complex financial journeys simple, inclusive, trustworthy, and engaging.

Reporting to the Head of Design Vertical, this is a senior, hands-on individual-contributor role and may not include direct reports. The successful candidate will lead through expertise, ownership, and influenceworking extensively with design peers and cross-functional colleagues in product, engineering, data, risk, compliance, marketing, operations, and country teams across our African markets.

Strong advantage: Expertise in motion design, animation, microinteractions, prototyping, or responsible AI-enabled design workflows.

Key Responsibilities :

1. Experience Vision and Design Leadership

• Define and communicate the UI/UX vision, principles, priorities, and roadmap for the organizations digital financial products.
• Own the complete design lifecycle for assigned use casesfrom discovery and journey definition through detailed interaction and visual design, validation, delivery, launch, and continuous improvement.
• Develop deep expertise in assigned ecosystems such as loans, savings, overdrafts, cards, and future propositions, while ensuring they form part of one coherent digital experience.
• Translate business and product strategies into coherent, customer-centred experiences across app, web, WhatsApp, conversational interfaces, and partner channels.
• Provide hands-on design leadership from early discovery and concept development through delivery, launch, and optimization.
• Set a high bar for usability, accessibility, visual quality, interaction design, and consistency across products and markets.
• Collaborate closely with design peers, share knowledge, contribute to critique, and help raise design quality without relying on formal line-management authority.
• Advocate for design at leadership forums and influence decisions using customer evidence, prototypes, data, and sound design rationale.

2. User Research and Customer Insight

• Develop a continuous research approach covering exploratory research, interviews, contextual inquiry, surveys, diary studies, usability testing, and post-launch learning.
• Build a deep understanding of customer needs, behaviours, financial literacy, trust concerns, accessibility needs, device constraints, and connectivity realities across African markets.
• Translate research findings into actionable insights, experience principles, personas or behavioral segments, journey maps, and opportunity areas.
• Partner with product analytics and data teams to combine qualitative insight with behavioral, funnel, and service data.
• Ensure underserved, vulnerable, and differently abled customers are appropriately represented in research and design decisions.
• Create an accessible research repository so customer insight can be reused across teams and product ecosystems.

3. Information Architecture and Journey Design

• Define clear information architecture, navigation models, content hierarchies, and interaction patterns that support intuitive task completion.
• Design end-to-end journeys spanning acquisition, onboarding, identity verification, eligibility, application, approval, activation, transactions, servicing, repayment, support, complaints, and closure, as applicable.
• Simplify complex financial concepts, decisions, terms, pricing, consent, and disclosures without compromising accuracy or regulatory requirements.
• Map cross-channel journeys and ensure customers can move smoothly between self-service, conversational, partner, and assisted channels.
• Identify friction, abandonment points, service failures, and manual hand-offs, then design improvements with measurable outcomes.

4. Interaction, Visual and Motion Design

• Create high-quality wireframes, user flows, interaction models, prototypes, and production-ready interface designs for mobile and responsive web experiences.
• Establish a cohesive visual language covering typography, colour, iconography, imagery, layout, data visualization, component behaviour, and content hierarchy.
• Design thoughtful microinteractions, transitions, feedback states, and motion that improve comprehension, guide attention, and make experiences feel responsive.
• Use animation purposefully for onboarding, status communication, education, product storytelling, and complex financial workflows while protecting performance and accessibility.
• Define complete states, including loading, empty, error, offline, declined, pending, success, and recovery experiences.
• Collaborate with engineering to maintain design fidelity and ensure interactions and animations are technically feasible and performant.

5. Design Systems and Design Operations

• Own and evolve a scalable, accessible design system across platforms, brands, markets, and product ecosystems.
• Define reusable components, patterns, tokens, content guidance, interaction behaviours, motion principles, and governance standards.
• Partner with engineering to align design libraries with coded component libraries and reduce inconsistency and rework.
• Establish effective design workflows, critique rituals, documentation, version control, hand-off standards, and quality-assurance practices.
• Track design-system adoption, contribution, accessibility, consistency, and efficiency.
• Balance a scalable global core with appropriate localization for language, culture, regulation, product configuration, and market needs.

6. Prototyping, Testing and Optimization

• Build low- and high-fidelity prototypes to communicate concepts, test assumptions, and de-risk delivery before development.
• Plan and facilitate usability studies and design experiments with representative customers.
• Define experience measures such as task success, completion time, error rate, comprehension, conversion, satisfaction, accessibility, and drop-off.
• Use research, analytics, session insights, customer feedback, and controlled experiments to continuously improve live journeys.
• Participate in design quality assurance before release and validate the experience after launch across devices, browsers, languages, and network conditions.

7. Inclusive Design, Accessibility and Trust

• Embed accessibility and inclusive-design practices throughout discovery, design, content, development, and testing.
• Design toward current WCAG standards and relevant platform accessibility guidance, including keyboard, screen-reader, contrast, focus, text-scaling, and reduced-motion needs.
• Create transparent experiences for consent, privacy, security, pricing, eligibility, credit decisions, repayments, and customer support.
• Partner with risk, compliance, legal, fraud, security, and conduct teams to meet obligations without introducing unnecessary complexity.
• Design for a wide range of devices, screen sizes, connectivity levels, languages, literacy levels, and cultural contexts.

8. AI and Emerging Experience Patterns

• Explore responsible uses of AI in research synthesis, ideation, content design, prototyping, personalization, customer support, and design operations.
• Design clear, safe, and useful AI-enabled and conversational experiences, including appropriate consent, disclosure, confidence cues, error handling, human escalation, and user control.
• Work with product, data, risk, compliance, and technology teams to address privacy, bias, explainability, security, and governance requirements.
• Evaluate emerging tools and interaction patterns based on real customer value rather than novelty.

9. Cross-functional Collaboration and Delivery

• Partner with product managers to shape roadmaps, define problems, prioritize opportunities, and establish measurable outcomes.
• Work extensively with peer designers and cross-functional leads, aligning related journeys, resolving dependencies, and maintaining consistency across product ecosystems.
• Collaborate closely with engineering, architecture, business analysis, data, marketing, operations, risk, compliance, legal, and country teams.
• Communicate design concepts, trade-offs, research findings, and recommendations clearly to senior leaders and delivery teams.
• Contribute to Agile discovery and delivery ceremonies while protecting sufficient time for research, validation, and design quality.
• Manage multiple workstreams, dependencies, timelines, and stakeholder expectations across markets.

Qualifications and Experience

Essential

• Bachelors degree in Human-Computer Interaction, Interaction Design, User Experience Design, Product Design, Graphic Design, Psychology, Computer Science, or a related discipline.
• Approximately 8+ years of progressive UI/UX or product design experience, including ownership of significant digital products, customer journeys, or design workstreams.
• A strong portfolio demonstrating end-to-end design thinking, customer research, interaction design, visual design, prototyping, and measurable product outcomes.
• Experience designing complex mobile-app and responsive-web journeys; fintech, digital banking, lending, cards, savings, payments, insurance, or another regulated sector is strongly preferred.
• Advanced proficiency in Figma and related tools for design, prototyping, collaboration, and design-system management.
• Strong command of information architecture, interaction design, visual hierarchy, responsive design, usability, accessibility, and human-centred design methods.
• Experience building or governing design systems and collaborating with engineering on reusable components.
• Ability to translate complex business, technical, risk, and regulatory requirements into simple customer experiences.
• Excellent communication, facilitation, storytelling, critique, collaboration, and stakeholder-management skills.
• Fluency in English and the ability to work effectively across countries, cultures, teams, and time zones.

Preferred

• Masters degree or relevant certification in design, HCI, research, accessibility, product management, or a related field.
• Experience designing digital financial services for African or other emerging markets.
• Experience leading complex design initiatives through influence and close collaboration with multidisciplinary peers; prior line-management experience is not required.
• Capability in motion design, animation, microinteractions, or advanced interactive prototyping using tools such as Figma, After Effects, Rive, Lottie, Principle, ProtoPie, or similar.
• Experience designing WhatsApp, chatbot, voice, conversational, or AI-enabled customer experiences.
• Working knowledge of HTML, CSS, front-end constraints, mobile platform conventions, and component-based development.
• Experience with analytics, experimentation, session-replay, research-repository, or accessibility-testing tools.
• Proficiency in French, Arabic, Portuguese, or other languages relevant to our African markets is an advantage.

Leadership and Behavioural Competencies

• Customer advocate: Builds empathy and represents customer needs with clarity and evidence.
• Design leader: Creates a compelling direction and raises quality through expertise and influence.
• End-to-end owner: Takes accountability for assigned use cases from discovery through live performance and iteration.
• Systems thinker: Connects journeys, channels, products, operations, and technology into a coherent experience.
• Craft focused: Cares deeply about detail while knowing when speed and iteration matter.
• Commercially aware: Connects design decisions to adoption, trust, efficiency, risk, retention, and growth.
• Evidence driven: Uses research, analytics, testing, and judgment to make and refine decisions.
• Collaborative influencer: Builds alignment with peers across disciplines, seniority levels, and markets.
• Inclusive and responsible: Designs for diverse abilities and contexts while protecting customer trust.
• Curious and adaptable: Keeps pace with changing customer expectations, tools, platforms, and emerging technologies.

Measures of Success

• Successful end-to-end design and launch of assigned product use cases, including established and emerging financial propositions.
• Improved task completion, conversion, activation, engagement, retention, and customer satisfaction across priority journeys.
• Reduced abandonment, usability issues, support demand, complaints, rework, and customer effort.
• Consistent, accessible, and high-quality experiences across products, channels, devices, and markets.
• Strong adoption and effective governance of the design system.
• Faster learning and delivery through effective research, prototyping, testing, and cross-functional collaboration.
• Improved accessibility compliance and inclusion of customers with diverse abilities, literacy levels, devices, and connectivity.
• Clear evidence that motion, animation, conversational design, or AI-enabled experiences improve usability and customer outcomes.
• Growth in design maturity and capability across the organization.

Why Join Us?

Join a mission-driven digital organization working to expand access to relevant and innovative financial services across Africa. You will shape the experience of products used across multiple countries and channels, build a modern design practice, and help make financial services simpler, more inclusive, and more empowering for millions of customers.