CredAbility is a UK fintech platform built to give users free access to their credit score, open banking data and personalised financial tools - all in one place. The mission was straightforward: make financial health accessible to people who'd been underserved by traditional banking products.
I joined at day one as the founding product designer and stayed for nearly five years - from the first sketch through to a platform trusted by over 2.5 million registered users.
This wasn't a single project. It was a product that grew in real time, with every design decision made under the pressure of a live user base, commercial targets and a regulatory environment that didn't leave much room for error.
Timeline:
Year 1 (2019–20): MVP - onboarding, dashboard, credit score tracker
Year 2: Credit card offers, brand evolution, dark web monitoring (Shield)
Years 3–4: Open banking integration, sign-up funnel optimisation, subscription services
THE CHALLENGE
The core design challenge at CredAbility was scale - not just in users, but in complexity. Each new service had to work seamlessly within an existing product that real people were using every day. There was no blank canvas. Every change had consequences.
Two moments defined the depth of the work.
The first was the sign-up funnel. MixPanel analytics and HotJar session data revealed clear drop-off patterns - particularly around address confirmation and compliance steps. The original flow had grown unwieldy over time.
I redesigned it from the ground up, reducing the journey significantly while maintaining full regulatory compliance. The result was a flow that felt proportionate to what users were actually being asked to do.
The second was a data insight that changed the product direction. Analytics from our CRM platform revealed that a significant proportion of users dropping out of the full sign-up had come for one specific thing: a credit card. Not a full financial health platform - just a card. Rather than fight that behaviour, I designed a dedicated Credit Card First environment - a lightweight, focused journey that let users apply immediately.
Full platform onboarding was only triggered after a successful application, at the point where the user had already received value and had a reason to stay.
Collaboration across: Product, Engineering, Growth, Data, CRM, Content and Compliance.
Tools: Figma· Maze · MixPanel · Miro · HotJar
CredAbility grew from zero to 2.5 million registered users and a monthly active footprint of over 500,000. The Credit Card First feature drove a significant improvement in application completion rates. The dark web monitoring service (Shield) launched across the full user base with strong opt-in rates across the first two campaign cycles.
Every improvement was evidence-led - built from research, tested with users, and iterated after release. The product kept getting better because the process was designed to make that possible.
