Banks, Brokers & Wallets

Situation Activation, Retention, SUS and Perceived Ease of Use were all weak: users were thrust into trading straight after registration, without any real onboarding.

Task Market research and user studies pointed the same way: rebuild the path from registration to first trade around learning first, with engagement built up in stages.

Action Game-inspired architecture let us decompose the interface and separate it by screen type: a terminal per trading instrument, borrowing patterns from YouTube, TikTok and Spotify. The app teaches before it lets you trade.

Result Post-launch user research and analytics confirmed improvements across Activation, Retention, SUS, and Perceived Ease of Use — specific numbers are under NDA, but the direction was positive.

Situation The company was hesitant to touch the brand at all, in case an update did more harm than good.

Task To assess and mitigate risks associated with brand repositioning, with the target metrics named up front: internal brand alignment score, revision rate, approval rate, brand perception alignment, and message cohesion score.

Action Given tight timelines, I cut the process down to interviews: dozens of them, with stakeholders, employees and clients in different countries, to get a current read on the audience, their values and their needs.

Result A refreshed brand positioning that moved the metrics named above, one strategic direction for everyone to work from, and a knowledge base that is still maintained.

Challenge Give the new IQ Option brand a 3D illustration language competitors could not cheaply copy — neither by hand nor by buying something close on Shutterstock — while keeping it identifiable as IQ Option at a glance. The two halves pull against each other: the more conventional the metaphor, the more likely something near it is already for sale.

Action Built the visual principles and a set of candidate illustrations around unconventional metaphors, then let testing pick between them rather than taste: association tests, A/B testing against competitors, emotional response testing and visual benchmarking.

Result An illustration pack that held both halves of the brief — tested for copyability and for brand identification, and shipped as the language of the new brand.

Challenge The platform had shown its global reach with the same flat world map for years. Replacing it meant something that still read as the brand at a glance, and was expensive enough to reproduce that a competitor would not bother.

Result An interactive 3D globe built in Three.js, embedded in the product and running on the website.

Market analysis, user research, customer development and behavioral analytics — all of it cut to fit the time-to-market window.

Situation The brand update had long been planned, but it was postponed due to the lack of a suitable moment.

Task A sudden opportunity arose to promote the brand at Wimbledon.

Action We ran the brand update in one day, in hackathon mode.

Result The promo ran at Wimbledon with the new identity. Client feedback was positive, and brand perception, awareness, trust, social engagement and share of voice all moved up.

The neobank's identity was done with very low quality, so when updating the application and brand, we concluded that everything needed to be put in order.

• Regulated flows designed end to end: uranium trading and national voting — domains where every state transition answers to law, and the interface has to make the legal state legible.
• A PoC validation framework that turned hypotheses into demonstrable concepts in days, which is what a partnership conversation actually needs.
• Design systems, brand identities and a crypto wallet delivered as the platform's own product surface.
• Partnerships supported: Visa, Maersk and Bentley — the three names the platform was measured by.

• Express24 MVP in 4 months — a stalled initiative restarted and shipped; ~30% of daily retail transactions moved from branches to digital channels.
• 150+ corporate clients onboarded to manage employee salary projects themselves, through the RBAC module built for it.
• Teller transaction time down ~40% — a custom browser extension for receipt printing, found by watching the branch floor rather than reading process docs.
• ExpressPay opened a new revenue line; 0 critical data breaches.
• Five pillars unified: Expressbank, ExpressPay, Express24, ExpressClub and Expresso cards — one product design language and one brand architecture.

The project was completed within 24 hours, and the instrument launched on the trading platform.