Overview

The three core Irish banks set out to launch a nationwide instant payment solution to compete with the fintechs emerging in the Irish market. The goal was to take a somewhat clunky existing system of entering IBANs to make bank transfers simpler, quicker and effortless while remaining equally as secure, in turn, increasing the total value of payments per month within the service and decreasing the total volume of payments going to third party apps (i.e. Revolut) .

As the lead designer for AIB payments, I worked with our internal, cross functional team, the other two banks, the Banking and Payments Federation Ireland (BPFI) and all legal and compliance stakeholders to craft a seamless mobile experience that reimagined P2P transfers for AIB customers, solving key user frustrations and frictions around IBAN entry and instant payments. The Zippay service will be available for the 4+ million users in Ireland between the three banks, 2+ million of those users of which will be through AIB.

Due to timelines and external commitments, the Zippay app was required to go live a few months prior to the new AIB app launching. This required Zippay to be designed and built for both the old and new app in different look and feels and with major entrypoint discrepancies.

Process

Discover

Branch intercepts

Branch intercepts include talking to customers in one of our bank branches about an idea or concept, and even showing them a mock up of the idea on the spot.

We used these intercepts at The Lab in Dundrum, Dublin, to get gut-reaction feedback before fleshing out the journey details. It let us see right away if people understood and liked the idea of sending money by their mobile number, spot any confusion early on and make quick tweaks before investing time and money in development.

Overall, users were very familiar with the idea due to competitive fintechs locally and globally and expressed the desire for the quicker, easier form of payment with AIB.

Peer analysis

Completing a peer analysis allowed for us to compare ourselves to others banks and fintechs to look at how similar brands are handling easier, instant P2P payments.

From our peer analysis, we identified that mobile-number payment journeys are faster, more intuitive, and have higher adoption rates, with users valuing simplicity, minimal data entry, and instant confirmation compared to IBAN-based transfers. Providers globally have already set the expectation and the first impressions of this concept is that it is already a basic expectation from the user.

Industry considerations and challenges

The goal of Zippay was to create a competitive P2P service with fintech, like Revolut. Naturally, this required collaboration with competitor banks that were facing similar challenges.

This led us to a radical approach: a collaborative effort among Ireland's three largest banks to create Zippay.

A primary consideration and challenge here was to find balance in keeping our competitive edge, while also collaborating cohesively with the other banks to create a unified-feeling platform that leveraged our collective customer base and existing trust.

This brought significant challenges, such as:

• Navigating complex legal and regulatory hurdles

• Aligning disparate internal systems and security protocols

• Fostering a culture of cooperation among teams that were historically rivals

This required us to redefine what a competitor was, shifting focus from a zero-sum game to a shared mission of retaining and serving our customers in the face of a common threat.

Define

User story map

Creating a user story map allowed me to break down the mobile-number payment journey into clear, user-focused steps within each sub-journey, including:

This helped to visualize the end-to-end experience, identify gaps and edge cases and prioritize features that would deliver the most seamless, intuitive flow for customers.

The problem statement

…….

Ideate

Deliver

Wire-framing

Based on the discovery, information architecture and content review, I moved to low-fidelity wire-frames in InVision Freehand. These are simple layouts with placeholder content that show where the key information, in coordination with the personas, should be placed on the webpages. These wire-frames allowed me to visualise various potential structures of the pages that could provide a solution to our problem.

High fidelity design

After feeling confident in my low-fidelity designs and receiving feedback from fellow designers, I was ready to start the high-fidelity designs. These designs are rich in detail, including the AIB branding and existing components from our AIB Design System component library with placeholder imagery only.

As our initial requirements did not allow for further development due to budget restraints, I used only existing components, which allowed me to quickly narrow the high-fidelity options down to only a handful of components.

Prototyping

After many iterations of the high-fidelity design, we were ready to create a prototype for user testing. Using InVision and Craft Manager, I created a desktop and mobile prototype of the design that had a restricted journey to the AIB Security Centre, so that users did not go outside the scope of the testings into the rest of the AIB websites.

Ahead of user testing, we decided to test using the mobile view only due to the content overload issue we faced at the project’s kick-off, wanting to especially test that the content was easily consumable, even on a small screen.

Customer testing

Round one (April 2025)

Using Lookback to connect virtually with our users and Dovetail for note-taking, I completed user testing with the goal of understanding initial reactions to the designs within the AIB branding look and feel and identify any potential pain points.

*Placeholder brand name “Jiffy” was used due to legal and privacy restrictions before the official service announcement.

Round two (May 2025)

After feedback and iterations from round one, retesting was completed in the search for any remaining pain points.

*Only feedback that was not previously collected and shared in round one was included in round two.

Final design (part one)

Design changes

Being an iterative process, our final design differed in various key areas from our findings of our prototype testing.

These areas include:

• We removed all alert banners, as we found most users experienced banner blindness and on mobile, this blocked users from seeing the ‘Think you may have been scammed?’ CTAs and scrolling on.

• We kept the SAFE slogan, but moved it lower on the pages as more educational, secondary content.

• We removed the ‘Looking for something else’ section, as we found most users were accustomed to using back buttons to navigate, rather than searching for navigation buttons.

• We combined the ‘Common frauds & scams’ and ‘Latest frauds & scams’ pages, as most users did not understand the difference. We made ‘Latest frauds & scams’ into a notices section on the ‘Common frauds & scams’ page to promote clarity between the sections.

Design handover

Once we were happy with our final designs, we presented back our findings and updates to the stakeholders. They were delighted with the updates and were happy to move forward with handover for the design build.

We hosted a meeting with ourselves, the stakeholders and the AIB website authors, presenting the designs and clarifying any questions. Developers were not included in this call due to resource restrictions, no development was necessary.

Challenges

No project comes without its challenges. Some key challenges faced throughout the project include:

• Redesigning and some new journey mapping was required considering the upcoming AIB new app and redesign. Prior research, stakeholder communications, and user maps were able to be re-used with the new look and feel and updated app entry points updated. Iterations and testing was re-done to test for any new pain points with the updated journeys and look and feel.

Final designs (part two)

Reflection

As my first end-to-end redesign in a designer role, I’m overall happy with the outcome of the project.

Having experience as a Product Management Associate working on redesigns from another angle, I did find the change in role perspective of thinking challenging at times, potentially going a bit above and beyond of the designer role to manage the project. However, I also think my previous role better prepared my soft skills and management skills, allowing me to feel confident in those aspects of the project and focus on further developing my design skills.