Years
2025–2026
Role
Senior Product Designer, Design Lead
Scope
Product strategy, UX/UI/IxD, Prototyping, Design system, UX writing
MARKET
Americans send more money out of the country than anyone else on earth, over 100 billion dollars in 2024. They pay some of the worst prices in the world to do it.
The World Bank tracks the cost of sending 200 dollars across borders. The global average sits at 6.36 percent. Banks, the default option for most people with a salary and a checking account, average 14.99 percent. The UN target for 2030 is 3 percent, and the gap between those numbers is the entire business case for what we were building.
Sources: World Bank Remittance Prices Worldwide, Q3 2025; World Migration Report 2026
CHALLENGE
The United States runs the largest economy in the world on some of the slowest consumer payment rails in it. ACH moves in batches and clears in days. Wires are same-day but expensive, final, and closed by mid-afternoon. Nothing settles on a weekend. Paper checks are still normal here in a way that surprises the rest of the world.
OPPORTUNITY
SOLUTION
Buburuza started as a consumer product with one promise: send any currency to any country, and never think about how it gets there. I joined at the beginning and owned the money layer.
I spent the first eight months on the consumer app: Accounts, Wallets, Send and Receive, Transactions, the token screen, Cards and Settings. Plenty of what we drew in the early months never shipped, which was the point of drawing it fast.
Pay with anything, get paid with anything
Every other product asks the same question first: what do you want to send. Hold euros, send euros. Hold ETH, send ETH to a wallet address and hope you picked the right network.
We deleted the question. You are in America, you owe a friend a hundred dollars, you open ACH. Then you pay with whatever you actually have. Euros. ETH. Dollars. The conversion happens underneath, the final fee and gas are quoted before you commit, and your friend gets dollars in his checking account. Send euros to a crypto wallet and they arrive as ETH. The rail still decides how money lands. What disappeared is the requirement to already hold the thing that lands.
Batch Pay and Deduction Method
Which breaks the moment one account is short. So I designed paying from several at once: pick the accounts, and the product proposes how to split the debit across them. I named the two halves Batch Pay and Deduction Method, and the names stuck, which is how you find out a concept was real.
Twenty dollars against a portfolio
The hardest flow I have built, and the one I presented to the CEO and to investors.
Borrow USDT against ETH and TRX you already hold. Simple to say, brutal to draw: the collateral moves while you sleep, the ratio moves with it, and there is a price at which the product takes your assets. Most lending interfaces bury that number because looking at it is unpleasant.
I put risk in the foreground instead. The level, the terms and the distance to liquidation stay visible at every step, including the steps where a person would rather not see them. A loan you did not understand is not a product, it is a complaint waiting for a date.
The screen people open when something is wrong
Nobody browses their transaction history for fun. They come because an amount looks off, or money has not arrived, or an accountant asked a question.
So the list is built to answer rather than to record. Filtering gets people to the entry fast, and the entry itself carries the rail, its real timing, both sides of any conversion, and fees itemised instead of folded into a total. Every line is written for someone who is already a little annoyed.
A card with a queue behind it
Payments were the foundation. Cards were the moment the product left the internet.
A virtual card connects to Apple Pay, which means it works at a counter anywhere on the planet. Attach one asset to it, or several, with fiat planned next. Payment Order lets you set the order they get spent: ETH first, then BTC, then the rest.
Which adds up to something I could not stop demoing. Issue a card, attach your assets, fly to Bali, pay for lunch by tapping your phone. Salary lands in your US dollar account, you move it to your wallet in a few clicks, and it is already spendable on the other side of the world. No branch, no exchange desk, no week of waiting. That is not a feature list, that is what banking is about to feel like.
The part I did not have to do
I got lucky with the team. The people under me were funny and genuinely creative, and we made a lot of things nobody would call product design: campaign visuals, App Store assets, and frankly a pile of very good memes.
We also talked our owner into flying to the office so we could film him properly, because he is the voice of the brand and no copywriter was going to replace that. Best business trip I have ever been on.
A NEW CHAPTER
Two months, and it had to work on a phone
What you are looking at is the responsive mobile build. Shipping a B2B MVP in two months is a challenge on its own. Shipping one that works properly on a phone is the part I am actually proud of.
Send Money is the flagship here, the flow the whole product exists to run. Business money does not reward cleverness, so we took the classical route: choose a recipient or create one, then choose the rail. Straight, predictable, boring in the way a finance team wants its payment tool to be boring.
The fourth option in that list is crypto. American B2B fintech does not offer that yet.
Everything a business needs on day two
Receive Money, Accounts, Wallets, Cards, FX rates, Recipients, statements, and the W-8 and W-9 flows that decide whether a company can legally be your customer at all.
These are the screens nobody puts in a portfolio and everybody uses on the second day. They are also the ones that decide whether a finance team trusts you with payroll.
OUTCOMES
50+
Flows designed
200+
Screens designed
2
Design systems built