Designing the concepts that would extend Apple Pay

2014 - 2015

Green Dot was approach by Apple to be the platform for iOS-native transaction capability. At the time, Apple Pay did little more than store card information to facilitate payments at the register. Adding actual transactional ability would require a backend such as Green Dots to actually move money from anywhere to anywhere. The project would evolve into nearly 2 years of concept development, technical feasibility assessments and contract negotiations resulting in the Apple Pay mobile payment platform we all know today. When you use Apple Pay, every transaction goes through the Green Dot backend regardless of which bank card you have, and this was the pitch work that won that relationship.

My work involved analysis of the iOS platform norms and the adaptation of their UI and design patterns to a new kind of interaction based on my transactional expertise gained while working at Green Dot. A number of our pitch concepts wound up looking pretty much exactly like the Apple build right down to the minimalist card graphic.

The desired synergy

The combination of our transactional framework and the simple mandate of the iOS user experience required a very clear, uncluttered design. Screens were kept clear of distractions and white (or in this case black) space reinforces the grid. On the back end, Green Dot had to re-write some of it’s underlying architecture to meet the standards of this new relationship. Mediating what our engineering team said we could do with the understanding of the experience we needed to deliver for Apple made for some tough conversations in sprint planning, but in the end it helped drive the right solution. Currently over 20 million users of this core iOS feature I helped build on the Green Dot backend.

Banking expertise & product experience

Working in fin-tech for over 10 years now has given me a pretty deep knowledge of the audience, and designing apps for 10 has given me some pretty firm ideas about how we should go about creating the experience that’s going to convert. It’s nice to see the financial services space moving away from traditional notions of “banking” and toward a more tech-forward mode. The fact that it still takes 3 days to ACH someone money in the year 2021 is nuts.