UX Design in Fintech: Banking Innovation | Patrik Borgatai

Alex: Hello everybody and welcome to the Curiosity Code podcast. I'm your host, Alex Chamekov and today I'm joined by Pat Patrick Borgatai. Patrick is a product and UX strategy consultant shaping digital experience across global banks, investment firms and fast growing fintechs. Patrick specializes in designing clear, human centered workflows for some of the most complex systems in finance. From private capital advising and treasury management to compliance, security and data heavy enterprise platforms. So in this episode we will explore how thoughtful design can simplify financial complexity, bridge strategy and user experience and drive real transformation inside highly regulated organizations. Really excited about this one. Patrick, welcome to the show.

Patrik: Hi Alex, thanks for having me.

Alex: Patrick, beyond what I covered in my introduction, do you have anything to add about your background? What are you up to these days? Just to give more context to the listeners and viewers.

Patrik: Well, first of all, I originally wanted to be a filmmaker, but I spent most of my career in finance UX and it's mainly because I generally interested in human psychology, you know, why people act the way they do. And I'm also fascinated by the financial world for the very same reason. And within fintech before these days, I've worked across several different areas including payroll and controlling and accounting, like accounts payable, accounts receivable and stuff like that. And yeah, from that I moved to security compliance and a number of banking environments such as treasury management. You mentioned this load origination, core banking. And now I mainly work with investment banks and private equity firms with Lab 49. Lab 49 is a niche premier consultancy firm working with Wall street financial institutions.

Alex: Cool, cool, cool. So let's dive into the world of design and I think I'd like to start with just explor, you know, major differences in ways you design for investment banks or private equity firms from designing for consumer facing fintech products because in my view those are two different worlds in a way. So I very curious to hear like major differences here.

Patrik: I will start by saying that traditional financial institutions are generally not technology companies and therefore their culture is very far from how tech companies operate. This is not only true for investment banks, but also for retail banks that serve consumers. And I think this is where the fintech space can be divided into three branches in some Retail banks cultural shift has started, or at least the technology department has broken away from the bank's traditional structure so they can innovate as an independent unit outside the usual bureaucracy and hierarchy that can be experienced in financial institutions. Before this happened, more than 10 years ago, the first Neo banks appeared. They realized that although traditional banks had money and sometimes even digital strategy, organizational structure made it impossible to create a strong enough value proposition for consumers. This is how companies like Revolut emerged. They recognized that there was basically no bank in the globe that could offer cash in more than 100 countries at the same rate. Or my favorite example from Estonia wise, we solved the problem related to correspondent banking. They could only do this because people coming from the financial world threw away the traditional banking mindset and applied the culture of tech companies, which is traditionally, you know, very empathic, and started innovating in areas that uses actual value. This brings us back to investment banks, where this extremely different external digital value proposition layer practically doesn't exist because an investment bank acts as an advisor between the sell side and the buy side. Here the value proposition needs to be internal. And in practice, the IT departments of investment banks operate almost like an internal agency that delivers bespoke solutions to business problems. Typical internal business problems include like analytics and reporting, for example, how to credit different teams for revenue coming from deals or staffing, how much workforce to allocate to each deal, and which metrics should support decision making. From a designer's point of view, the major difference between the investment banking world and consumer fintech is that traditional adoption and conversion mindset doesn't apply here. Instead, the key drivers are time and also risk and error reduction. And all of this happens in workflows that are complex and mainly domain intensive.

Alex: I'd like to tap a little bit more into that. How do you measure success of this system that's used by bankers and analysts? So it's definitely not applicable to use the same ways we measure engagement or retention for the customer for end user facing interfaces and products. So how do you define and measure good UX in such environments?

Patrik: That's a good question. I think for me the answer is consistency and principles. Bankers come to us with many different types of requests and they usually expect tailored bespoke solutions. My favorite analogy for this comes from men's tailoring. For decades, traditional tailoring houses has been creating custom garments for individual clients, always following the same philosophy and process while respecting each client's unique measurements. Each tailoring house has its own principles. If you go to Naples to get A suit made, you will get a soft shoulder Neapolitan suit that is made specifically for your body. If you go to London and do the same thing, the result will be much more structured and rigid in the shoulders. So investment banks I think are similar. They are not all the same. This means we have to decide what business we are in and what our style is. Once that is defined, we need to deliver individual solutions but always within the same foundational principles.

Alex: Interesting. Can you give any examples of how would those principles look like? And what will be the definition of success in terms of ux?

Patrik: Yeah, that's also a really good question. I think financial institutions are inherently risk averse places and for me, especially with the clients we are working with, some clients has different approaches. Like some clients are thinking of groups like departments within the bank and they are operating very differently. But in some ways they are very similar as well. So some institutions made the decisions to make a very structured and centered way of product development. But others made the decision to not follow this to make very small pieces at the end of the road they somehow try to stitch these together. I think both ways are valid. I saw both madewell and also really bad ways. But yeah, these are just, you know, different word and based on how the business is thinking of himself.

Alex: Yeah, it sounds like it's a. It's all very different Even depending on the size of the organization. Right. The, the requirement and the definitions could differ a lot by the way you work, you know, across multiple cultures, locations, company sizes. I'm curious, what are the biggest challenges in aligning UX strategy across distributed financial organizations?

Patrik: I think there are three major obstacles. One is domain fragmentation, the ownership and in many places the authority. And in investment banking organization the same workflow can be executed by different teams in different systems with different cultures and different KPIs. For a shared UX strategy to work, the first step is to align on the definition of the task itself. What does success mean for each workflow? And the second challenge is prioritization. In New York for example, the speed is the priority. Almost the speed. Like I mean almost all cases the speed is the priority. In London it's more like the compliance and in Tokyo for example, it's relationship driven workflows. If these priorities are not explicitly declared, the design system falls apart. The third challenge maybe is the rhythm of communication. A UX strategy needs a steady cadence. Without it, each region eventually drifts back to its own local solutions.

Alex: We spoke about importance of principles a bit earlier and I think you mentioned that those Principles sometimes stand throughout the history of the industry and the companies. Some companies quite old and bring their own way of doing business. In your opinion, what timeless principles do you find most relevant in modern banking? Ux.

Patrik: It's a good question. I think all of them like yeah, but jokes aside, I think there are three timeless principles. Predictability, feedback and control. In investment banking workflows, the user never wants to be surprised. They want to know what is happening and why it is happening and what the consequences are. Another principle is aligning with the user's mental model. If bankers think in Excel, like in Excel spreadsheets, there's no shame in using Excel like metaphors in the interface. And the third principle is context around data. It's not about the volume of data, it's about the relationship within it. Modern banking UIs is not about, you know, colorful charts like, you know, it's not about pretty banking, it's about fast decision support. But in human terms, there are very few, very simple laws that are never going to change. For example, business stakeholders are constantly worried that users don't scroll and therefore won't find the right button or input field, which we as UX designers know it's just not true. If you think about it, we spend most of our lives scrolling on our phones and it's no different when people are working on a desktop computer in professional setting. These beliefs usually come from the fact that in some cases we simply don't measure what users do. And when a user can find something, we fall back to these old sayings. So in those situations we have to push back a little. But that's part of why we are here, to help the businesses make better decisions. I think.

Alex: I think that brings me to another point that we really like to discuss on this podcast. I can count probably already five guests that we've been talking about and everybody has their own opinion, so I'm curious to hear yours. So we all agree that most of the legacy enterprises they built their systems with not about thinking much of user experience. And now that we have a world where we can introduce very good user experience, but at the same time most of the fundamentals are built on legacy systems. So hence we're facing redesigning challenge. I'm curious to learn, what's your take on that? How do you approach redesigning this legacy systems without disturbing business critical operations?

Patrik: I would say incremental modernization. And I intentionally avoided using the word automation because 99% of cases we are not actually automating the decision making itself. So of course first you Map the workflow and then you redesign the edge points. You don't replace the monolith, you just target the user's most painful touch points. Another key step is uncovering the system interfaces. Because in these environments the reality often sits in the interface. Like APIs, file export and reconciliation flows, redesign is successful in mind terms when it integrates seamlessly and doesn't interrupt the work as done before. The third component is a proper fallback and rollback strategy. In finance, there's no luxury for downtown.

Alex: I think there are some consequences of following that, but I cannot think of a better way. A good example is one of the banks that I use in Canada. They started a redesign project probably five years ago and you can still find bits and pieces of their system in old design and then the part of it is in the new design and it's like a Frankenstein, you know. But at the same time as a tech person I kind of get it. But as a end user it's sometimes frustrating to be part of this transition which takes years and you see multiple interfaces in the same user experience.

Patrik: I think this happens all the time. My mom doesn't like the new way of Apple's design approach, this bubbly liquid glass stuff. And for example, Apple can make very bold moves because that's the point of Apple. They are innovating how we approach design and this is part of what they are selling to their customers. They are innovative. You are bringing new ideas to the table, you are changing the way you think of technology. And we have the same in finance like Revolut does this and Wise and Monet's and companies like that. But this is not our job. I think almost in any other financial institutions. Maybe even it's not the case in traditional retail banking.

Alex: So what you're saying is that those Neo banks, they're kind of driving the wave and defining the standards in a way how users are expecting certain experiences to be and then the conventional institutions are catching up.

Patrik: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think, yeah, basically that that's the case I would say in my country. Revolut is famous for every other thing that they, that what, what they. Or, or how they started out. It's famous for sending money for free. It's, you know, you're just clicking on it and you. It's like Venmoing in, in the US we are mainly using for this and also we are using for, for online payments because you can generate endless amount of single use cards which is also I think in some ways a very, very niche, very Specific to my country, because in my country we don't use credit cards, for example. So it's obvious to use something that is just a single use card. And then other retail banks within this small market are adopted because Revolut has 2 million users in a 10 million country and they had to follow what they do. Of course they can do the same because they are regular banks with these hierarchical systems. And it is really hard to, you know, it's like think about like you have a huge ship which tries to turn around and a very small boat. Revolut is a small boat. Well, not these days, but it was. The regular banks are huge ships. You can just, you know, follow the ways in some cases, but you can turn around.

Alex: What do you think are the main barriers for the true digital transformation in traditional financial institutions and how can UX design help overcome them?

Patrik: I think the biggest barrier is not technological, it's more like cultural, which we already touched. Most decisions are distributed across stakeholder zones like IT and then compliance and product and bankers and stuff like that. You know. The second barrier is the legacy workflows. Many workflows are manual and not because of technical limitations but because of corporate politics or, you know, unclear ownership. It is really hard to change. And this is where UX becomes a catalyst, I think because it just visualizes reality, exposes waste and creates a shared language. Once an organization is looking at the same process map, half of the transformation has already happened before we built anything.

Alex: Patrick, I'd like to wrap up this conversation by looking into visionary direction and if you could envision the ideal investment bank where ux, good UX is embedded into every business decision. What would that look like?

Patrik: It would look like a world where design is not just the team that delivers UI, but part of of decision enablement. It will be more and more critical in the age of AI and we constantly fight for those seats for those positions in the best interest of our clients of the businesses. Product operations and technology operates under shared ownership and UX participates in everything from pitch preparation to actually building and shipping the product. I think what's the biggest missing point right now is there are most of the places there are measurable workflows. The productivity KPIs are missing like design, governance and prototyping capabilities that validate solutions before they hit the business. And most importantly, efficiency, data quality and risk exposure are not IT issues. They are board level level outcomes. So the best way to do this is just have a designer and sitting at a table at the board and having a leader Amongst other business leaders

Alex: in the room, you mentioned something interesting that it's very critical in the current development of AI, era of AI. And I realized that we actually never touched the point of AI in this conversation. And it's strange because we usually talk about AI a lot. Why do you think it's critical?

Patrik: With the age of AI, what is happening is not people actually losing their jobs. Of course some people are losing their jobs and will lose because it is not holding enough value in a day to day workflow. So those people skills will be redefined pretty soon. But the other thing is that AI is changing the interfaces. We have to think of more and more like workflows, which is not typical in banking environments. Most of the cases we are just, you know, thinking of screens and UIs. But AI enables us to have an environment when we can contextualize what AI can do. And this means we are changing your screen. Maybe the user will see displays of screens and content on the screens that wasn't designed before. So that's why we need principles, that's why we need well made, well mapped out workflows. Because then what AI can do is just to replicate the building elements of what we have designed before.

Alex: Makes sense. Makes sense. Well, Patrick, thank you very much for the conversation. That's been a great and insightful conversation about the role of UX design and strategy in the world of finance. Thank you Alex, for the listeners, thanks for listening till the end. Don't forget to hit the like button. Subscribe and see you in the next episodes. Bye bye.