Black Leather: A Fintech Platform Exploration

Project Overview Black Leather is a fintech mobile app I conceived that collates users' different accounts (banks, cards, wallets) into one place. It tracks inflows/outflows and enables effective monthly budgeting.

My Role Product Designer, UX/UI Designer and Researcher.

Timeline & Constraints [4 weeks, using Figma, working with a Product Lead]

The challenge of scattered finances

Creating clarity with one unified platform

Designing a seamless and actionable experience

Smooth developer handoff

Learnings and future directions

Managing money today often means juggling across multiple banks, apps, and cards. People check their balances on multiple different platforms, with others to track expenses, and budgeting. This fragmented experience makes it hard to get a clear sense of how much is coming in, how much is leaving, and whether they’re actually on track with their goals. Nearly 50% of young adults (aged 19-36) admit they don’t have a structured way to track their spending. (Bankrate, 2023).

Black Leather brings all accounts and cards together into one place. With a user-friendly interface syncing balances, transactions, and spending categories, it provides users with a single source of truth about their finances.

Instead of cobbling together different apps, users can:

After multiple setbacks (read: frustrations) and iterations, I came to my high-level goals guiding the design:

Make financial clarity effortless and automatic

Provide actionable tools for budgeting and tracking

Reduce the stress of scattered financial management

I designed the main flow with first-time users in mind, introducing them to the app’s key features while keeping the complexity under control.

This final (after many, may iterations) app's structure, from users tests I conducted:

Effectively syncs accounts and transactions.

Minimizes overwhelm from this data through visual dashboards.

Makes budgeting feel intuitive and actionable.

Link a new bank account

Set up a monthly budget

View & categorize transactions

Manage virtual cards

Here's the basic information architecture for navigating the platform:

Onboarding: Connect accounts securely → See an overview of all balances → Get a first snapshot of monthly inflows/outflows.

Budget setup: Suggested categories auto-generated from transaction history → Users can tweak or personalize → Budgets adjust dynamically.

Tracking: Clear visual indicators of progress toward goals → Notifications when spending patterns deviate → End-of-month reports with insights.

The Black Leather design system was developed as a scalable foundation for the entire product experience, built with variables for different situations (active and passive states, with variants for color, thickness and size).

With a library of over 200 components, the system ensures consistency across touchpoints while remaining flexible enough to accommodate new features.

Each component was designed for visual harmony and function, enabling rapid iteration without sacrificing quality. Early testing went great, with 80% of participants reporting that the interface felt familiar and intuitive—key in building user confidence.

Deliverables:

Dashboards that unify all accounts.

A cohesive design system to for platform-wide identity.

Notes, highlighting details and thought processes to the developers for sync.

Wireframes, High-fidelity UI screens and their prototypes

Through this project, I learned that the true value isn’t just aggregation, but actionable clarity — showing people not only where their money is, but what that means for their decisions.

The next step for me, is building out the rest of the flows and more pages, since I didn't have time here. Also, iterating on execution strategies used. Design is never truly finished