Designing a Life Advisor Marketplace for Standard Bank

Standard Bank set out to expand its offering with 80+ banking and non-banking products across South Africa, Cameroon, and Nigeria. The challenge?

Deliver a clear strategy, a market-differentiating user experience, and a scalable MVP—all in just eight weeks.

As the UI/UX designer and design strategist, I led research, strategy, information architecture, and design execution to bring this ambitious marketplace to life.

We conducted interviews across key user groups to uncover how people view banks as more than just financial institutions.

By clustering user responses into capabilities that the bank could deliver, two major themes emerged:

Trust in curating quality offering

Personalization based on life context and data.

These insights became the cornerstone of our strategic direction.

Using a value curve analysis, we mapped Standard Bank against players like Amazon, Alibaba, Makro, and niche stores.

By combining market gaps with user insights, we defined a unique value proposition archetype:

The Life Advisor – a marketplace that doesn’t just sell products, but helps users navigate life projects by anticipating their needs and offering personalised, relevant recommendations.

This insight framed both our experience design and future feature roadmap.

To scope the MVP strategically, we created three future-state user journey scenarios: • First touchpoint • Active engagement • Full advisor experience

These helped us align with stakeholders, prioritise key features, and map how the marketplace could evolve into a fully personalised ecosystem over time.

We designed a scalable UI kit and component library that empowers Standard Bank’s internal teams and third-party devs to: • Add new products with consistency • Build out checkouts and flows faster • Maintain brand cohesion across a growing catalog.

The result? A marketplace that’s flexible, maintainable, and future-ready.

The MVP focused on delivering value through a set of core, scalable screens, including: • User profiles and projects: Organize needs around life events/goals • Product pages: Tailored for both functional (e.g., insurance) and inspirational (e.g., travel) offerings. • Personalised financing: Leveraging banking data for smarter recommendations and contextual payment options.

These screens brought the Life Advisor concept to life within a focused, testable product.

Here’s a glimpse of the final UI, where trust, usability, and personalization converge.

From smart product discovery to intuitive checkout flows, every interaction is designed to feel tailored, effortless, and bank-backed—positioning Standard Bank as more than just a place to hold money, but a trusted guide for life’s major decisions.

With the core experience live, the next step is turning this marketplace into a relationship-builder, not just a transaction engine.

By inviting users to connect their bank profiles or share contextual data, the marketplace can evolve into a highly personalized ecosystem—delivering smarter recommendations, better financial options, and relevant product bundles based on real life needs.

Next steps we proposed:

📦 Goal-based shopping (e.g. “setting up a home office”)

🎁 Tiered loyalty rewards based on banking tiers or engagement

📋 Lifestyle onboarding quiz to tailor the product feed

This phase transforms the platform from a product catalog into a true “life advisor” experience, deepening user trust and boosting long-term engagement.