In the past decade, the face of consumer banking has changed dramatically for millions of users across the UK and Ireland. At the same time, a wide range of financial services have been transformed by fintech innovation, with this sector becoming a key contributor to both Irish and British economic growth.
One underrated factor in the success of these firms is right under our noses: their commitment to effective UX thinking. By reimagining the user experience of financial services, businesses like Monzo, Wise, Revolut and Stripe have accelerated adoption across global markets.
Here’s how UX thinking became such a powerful advantage for these fintech companies.
What is UX thinking
The term “UX” is often associated only with visual design. While the look and feel of a digital product matters, UX is really about understanding what users are trying to do, what gets in their way, and how a digital experience can help them complete that task with more confidence.
In financial services, this matters enormously. Money is personal, and users need more than speed or convenience. They also need to feel secure, informed and in control. If a journey is confusing, if fees are unclear, or if the next step is hard to find, trust can evaporate quickly.
The fact that most legacy banking providers had not yet embraced user-friendly online financial services presented a tempting opportunity in the 2010s. If new fintech businesses could outflank their competition on this issue, they could quickly gain market share.
Rather than simply digitising traditional banking processes, many of these fintech firms asked a more valuable question: how should this experience actually work for the user?
Removing friction: Monzo
The most obvious UX improvement came by removing friction from everyday banking. For many users, traditional banking was bogged down in slow processes, limited visibility and awkward customer journeys. Simple tasks like opening an account, tracking spending, setting budgets or understanding where money was going often required too much effort from the user.
Monzo set out to resolve the basic user experience of online banking. Its product experience was built around clarity, speed and immediacy, helping users feel more connected to their money. Instant spending notifications gave people real-time feedback, while spending categories made habits easier to understand. Pots allowed users to separate money for bills, savings or specific goals in a way that felt simple and natural.
The value of these features comes from the fact that they solve real user problems. They make banking feel more responsive, more understandable and more closely aligned with the way people actually manage money in everyday life.
In Monzo’s case, UX helped turn banking into something people could interact with regularly, rather than something they only checked when they had to.
Revealing valuable information: Wise
In financial services, information is everything. Yet many traditional financial products have historically made important data overly difficult to understand. Fees, exchange rates, transfer times and hidden charges can all create uncertainty for users, particularly when they are moving money across borders.
Wise built much of its early advantage around challenging that experience. Its proposition was not only about moving money internationally, but about making the process feel clearer. Users could see what they were paying, what exchange rate was being used, how much the recipient would receive, and when the money was expected to arrive.
In many cases, especially in financial services, good UX means revealing the right information at the right time, in a format people can actually understand.
Rationalising the banking experience: Revolut
Revolut’s growth shows another side of fintech UX: the ability to bring a wide range of financial services into one coherent experience. Traditional banking often separates different needs across different products, departments, portals or providers. A customer might use one service for day-to-day banking, another for currency exchange, another for travel spending, another for savings and another for investments.
By bringing many of these services into a single app environment, Revolut created a more connected experience for the user. The value was not simply in offering more features, but in making those features feel accessible within one broader financial ecosystem.
Considering every stakeholder: Stripe
Stripe is one of the best examples of UX thinking beyond the end customer. At first glance, payments might seem like a purely technical problem. But Stripe understood that one of the most important users in the payment experience was not always the person entering their card details.
It was also the developer, founder, finance team or operations team trying to integrate and manage payments behind the scenes. That insight helped Stripe turn developer experience into a major competitive advantage.
For developers, a good experience means clear documentation, logical APIs, useful error messages, reliable testing tools and fast implementation. For business owners, it means less operational complexity. For finance teams, it means better reporting and clearer reconciliation. For end customers, it means a smoother checkout and fewer failed transactions.
Stripe’s success shows that UX thinking should consider the full ecosystem of people involved in a product or service. This is especially important for B2B fintech, where the buyer, user and end beneficiary may all be different people.
Beyond fintech: The bigger picture
The lesson from fintech is not that every business needs to look or behave like a banking app, but rather that complex services become much more valuable when they are easier to understand, easier to trust and easier to use.
Fintech companies succeeded because they looked closely at where traditional financial services created friction. They questioned why certain processes were slow, why information was unclear, why users felt out of control, and why technical integration was often so painful. Then they designed better experiences around those problems.
Clever UX helps organisations reduce friction, clarify value and build trust. It ensures that digital experiences are not only attractive, but useful, accessible and commercially effective. Most importantly, it can provide sharp competitive advantages against legacy players and help drive adoption from wider audiences than would otherwise be possible.
To learn more about how UX thinking can transform your business, reach out to Kooba today. We’d love to talk more.
