Skiply

The new Skiply had to work for a whole family, not just the person making a payment. Parents needed control over education and family spending, while children needed a much simpler way to access and understand their own money.

With little recent research to inherit, I started with stakeholder interviews, competitor research and the existing product. We looked at modern fintech products, mapped how education payments worked in the UAE and used usability testing throughout the project to validate key decisions.

The biggest change was moving away from a marketplace built around individual payments. The family wallet became the core of the product and brought school fees, children's money, budgets and cards into one place, with separate roles for parents and children.

A lot of the old experience was dictated by technical constraints and legacy banking processes. I worked closely with the team to challenge those constraints whenever they hurt the experience, rather than simply designing around them. In one case, this helped us reduce a 32-screen registration journey to 12.

We rebuilt the core flows and the visual language. The app now opens into the wallet rather than a catalogue of school services. The screens below show what everyday use looks like: the card page, sending money and splitting a payment.

Skiply needed its own identity while still living inside the Rakbank ecosystem. I built a design system that reused shared foundations where it made sense, while introducing Skiply-specific components, patterns and visual rules that gave the team a clear foundation for future work.

I also worked on Skiply outside the app: marketing communications, imagery and branded materials. When AI became part of the visual workflow, I documented the tools, prompts and principles so anyone on the team could reproduce the style, not just the designer who invented it.

By the end, Skiply had a new product direction, a rebuilt core experience and a design system to build the next features on. The annotated specification and documentation below show how the work was handed over to the team.

From fall 2025 to summer 2026, our IT transformation program received more than 25 industry awards.

My biggest takeaway is that in fintech not every technical limitation deserves to be accepted. Some constraints are real; others are just decisions nobody has revisited. Asking what each one costs the user is how we told them apart. The 32-screen registration was the clearest case.