American Express Global Pay
I designed core flows, pages and components of the end to end Global Pay responsive web experience for SMB cardmembers. I also led design reviews with product owners and engineers and collaborated with the research team to formulate hypotheses and validate high risk assumptions.
Role
Product Designer
Team
Senior Product Designers
Product Owners
Engineers
Legal
Duration
2.5 Years
Context
Amex Global Pay (formerly known as FX International Payments) allows small businesses to easily and quickly make payments to their suppliers both locally and across the globe. Business owners can also track and manage payments their payments to suppliers.
Problem
Back in 2018, the FX International Payments platform had 26,000 clients in 5 markets, 1.4 million transactions annually, $26.5 billion in payments volume and about 15% YOY growth.
However, the cross-border payment platform was technically outdated and limiting, non-intuitive and non-responsive, and distinct from other commercial products and infrastructure. It was essentially rife with opportunities for improvement.
FX International Payments Platform (2018)
The Challenge
There needed to be a complete overhaul of the end-to-end digital experience of the cross-border payments product in an effort to:
a) make it easier & faster for small to mid-sized business owners to use it
b) introduce new features in the future
c) expand the service to a larger group of clients
The new and improved design would need to be modular, flexible and accessible to accommodate for new features and different user segments along the way.
Area of Opportunity
The overarching goal was to build a modern, intuitive product that
a) is integrated with the enterprise suite of products
b) scalable and
c) enables digital self-servicing.
This would ensure that we remained a trusted and reliable partner to our clients.
We aimed to automate processes where possible in an effort to increase volume and run into few capacity constraints while doing so.
Final Solution
Adding a Recipient
Research showed that business owners frequently made payments to the same suppliers. Therefore, it was essential for us to allow business owners to add and save a recipient’s bank information in order to quickly make payments. We worked very closely with the the engineering team to determine what the logic would be and what information was necessary in order to successfully find and display a recipient’s bank.
Payment Details Page
Create a Payment (left) & Add a Recipient (right)
Global Pay Homepage
Learnings
What I Learned about our Clients
Businesses who make international payments and wire transfers prefer to use a well-known, established financial service. Customer service is highly valued. Transparency around delivery dates, rates (and knowing that they’re getting the best rate) and the status of payments is the most relevant information to them. Consistency and reliability in the end-to-end journey is also crucial and helps to create and maintain trust.
What I Learned about Processes
If something isn’t working, we as designers must feel empowered to take the initiative and find solutions to improve the efficiency of everyday workflows (retroactives have been incredibly helpful with this). Additionally, documentation is always necessary. Between emails, Slack messages, Confluence, excel sheets, PowerPoint presentations and recorded webex calls - collaboration and knowledge sharing is what will push us forward and help minimize risk in the long run.
What I Learned about Research
Continuously hypothesizing and testing is the best way to determine whether what we’re building will help make our clients’ lives easier or not. Design thinking also played a significant role in helping the larger team align and prioritize on initiatives and build a roadmap (even if that roadmap kept changing every quarter). Inviting stakeholders, engineers and PMs into usability testing sessions and readouts is a great way to advocate for research. Accessibility should not be an afterthought. Lastly, research should mostly confirm our assumptions and very rarely should our findings come to us as a surprise.
Overall Process
Recipient Bank Code Selection
I planned and led some quick user testing sessions to figure out what the most familiar design pattern was for a business owner to enter their recipient’s bank information. The majority of the participants preferred to toggle between the IBAN and sort code using radio buttons, which validated our assumptions. Below is how I documented the findings:
