My first steps in the Fintech industry

In July 2014, my friend Julián Dirakis wrote to offer me a job. He was working in RecargaPay and the company was hiring a graphic designer. I had just arrived from Brazil. I have been in different cities and followed the Argentinian team during the world cup ⚽ 🏖. I was still tanned and euphoric for the match, but also sad because we lost the final. 😥

We arranged an interview with Álvaro Teijeiro, the CTO of the company. “We are creating an app that will work like a digital wallet focused on Brazil” he said 🤯. I still hadn’t finished taking off the beach sandals and destiny wanted me to put my feet in the sand again. “These people are crazy” 🤪 I thought. It was an ambitious idea…an impractical idea.

One month later, I started to work with them on the project 👨‍💻. It happened on Monday September 1st. 🗓 and, for the obsessive people, if the month starts on monday it’s a good sign.

At that moment, there weren’t any digital wallets in Latin America and RecargaPay didn’t work as one either. Sending money, bill payments, loans, credit card…I didn’t find anything about it. We just had one product: topup mobile phone 📱. Let’s see that to be a wallet, it needed more functionality, which was a big challenge.

The first project I worked for was the development of topup mobile phone for Windows Phone ⚰. We bought a Nokia phone because nobody knew or used Windows Interface. The objective seemed easy: copy the Android flow and design a new one focused on Metro Design System.
But…we needed to check some important points:

• The product was opening to Latin America and USA, so we had a lot of user cases.
• Half of the development team was in Ukraine.
• It was my first project…with an unknown platform…with an unknown product…with a remote team in another time zone and it was a complete new launch for the company.

OK! Welcome to the jungle…😧

The project was done and the quality was high 💪. But the most important subject was understanding how the system was development and how the work methodology of RecargaPay was.

To infinity and beyond…🚀

In 2015 the UX team had only two people (were the Argentinians using the UX concept them? 🤔). Our tasks were to make products flow, design interfaces, unify key visual, check some metrics but also create some pieces for marketing, social media, archigraphy, etc 🖥✏. In that context I proposed to make a promotional video for Google Play. In 10 days we designed the storyboard, recorded the audio and made the animation. The result was excellent: during the first weekend the user acquisition was +2%.👏👏👏

The app was growing 😀 and we added new products: topup to transport cards 🚌, send money to users contacts 💸, bill payments, loans 💰, debit card 💳, refer a friend 🙋, etc. I was in the “kitchen” of each launching and it was the key to understand what we were doing and why we were doing it. I understood the business objectives, the priorities, the sprints built, the iteration, the learning of that iteration and finally a new iteration again.

The company was growing too 💪 and the team incorporated new tasks. We needed to get out and empathize with the users: get to know them better, where they lived, where they used the app, when they used the app, what the context was, how they felt when they used the app, etc.

All that information was added to other points that we learned about the business: what day of the month the users used the app 📅, how many times they used it, what the product most requested was, what the user’s device was, what was the product with the most volume transaction was, etc

There are a lot of methodologies to do research and get data to improve the product. But the first one is to detect the user’s needs and ask a question: what are our resources to solve the problem? In my experience, there are three variables to analyse and define the best solution: the scope, the resources and the time.

I’m a problem-solver that works with all the areas involved in a product and in some cases we find quick wins…that’s something I love 😃.