Mobile Secure Digital Wallet

In 2021, during the height of the pandemic, our team identified a critical gap in the Dominican Republic's financial infrastructure. 55% of the working population lacked access to banking — meaning everyday transactions like paying bills, sending money to family, or paying a vendor required cash. Around 43% of the population was handling significant sums entirely in physical currency.

I co-founded Moneda and led product design end-to-end. This is the story of two distinct phases: an early, research-driven effort to prove the product was even feasible and usable for this population, and a second phase where we took those learnings and built something mature enough to ship.

COVID-19 made the gap visible in a new way. People who had always relied on cash — traveling to payment centers, handing money to intermediaries, carrying bills through neighborhoods — were suddenly doing so in a context of rising crime and economic instability. The risks weren't abstract.

The existing digital solutions in the market were designed for banked users in larger economies. The competitive landscape offered no real answer for a first-time digital wallet user in Santo Domingo with limited smartphone familiarity and deep distrust of financial institutions. We weren't competing with other apps — we were competing with cash.

Before we touched a single wireframe, we traveled to the Dominican Republic to do field research. We visited colmados — the corner stores that serve as informal social and financial hubs across Dominican neighborhoods — and conducted structured interviews and observations with residents across different income levels, ages, and degrees of smartphone literacy.

Our goals were specific: Would users trust a digital wallet? Was making digital transactions "attractive" enough to change behavior? How do we get the product in front of users early enough to learn fast? The research gave us our three core pain points and shaped the hypothesis we'd go into Phase 1 to test.

Phase 1 had one goal: prove the concept was usable before we invested in high-fidelity design. We ran crazy-eights exercises to generate ideas fast, built paper prototypes from cardboard and printed screens, and took them back into the field.

We tested those paper prototypes with real users — not in a conference room, but in the same environments where the product would actually be used. People tried to "pay" with the paper UI while standing next to a vendor, the way they would in real life. We watched where they got stuck, what they misread, and what made them hesitant. The goal wasn't polish — it was signal.

The early designs were rough. Interactions that seemed obvious to us were invisible to first-time digital wallet users. Language that felt neutral came across as institutional and cold. We iterated quickly, and those failures in Phase 1 became the foundation for everything in Phase 2.

Armed with what we learned in Phase 1, we rebuilt the core experience with a maturity and precision the early prototypes couldn't have. The dashboard was redesigned to make financial state immediately legible — balance, recent activity, and actions were structured around what users actually needed to see first. QR scanning became a primary interaction pattern for payments, which research had shown was more intuitive and trustworthy than account-number-based flows for this user base.

We developed a full system design — components, patterns, and interaction standards that allowed the growing team to build new features without reinventing the foundation. The brand was refined into a cohesive visual language: a deep green palette rooted in trust and growth, warm earth tones that felt familiar rather than corporate, and Spanish-language copy written for the user, not the product.

Every decision in Phase 2 was traceable back to something we'd learned in Phase 1. That feedback loop — hypothesis, test, learn, iterate — was what made the final product work for the people it was designed for.

Moneda launched as a Spanish-language P2P payments and bill-pay platform serving the Dominican Republic. It addressed equitable design challenges faced by non-banking populations across the LATAM market — not by simplifying a Western fintech product, but by designing from the ground up for a user base with a different relationship to money, institutions, and technology.

The two-phase approach proved the model: doing the hard, low-fidelity, in-the-field work first made the shipped product substantially better. The trust signals, interaction patterns, and language choices that made Moneda work weren't invented in Figma — they were discovered in colmados in Santo Domingo.