The Problem

Greece's banking system has a complicated recent history. Years of financial instability, capital controls, and institutional failures left many Greek consumers deeply wary of banks, and particularly wary of anything new. Into this environment, Praxia arrived with an ambitious proposition: launch the country's first fully app-based bank, replacing printed forms, branch visits, and bureaucratic friction with a seamless, mobile-first experience.

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The brief wasn't simply to design a good banking app. It was to design one that people would actually trust, in a market where that trust had been badly damaged, and where the nearest reference points for digital banking were foreign products built for entirely different contexts.

My Role

I led the end-to-end design engagement as Product Design Lead and CX Lead. My responsibilities spanned the full scope of the project: UX strategy, user research, design direction, prototyping, and stakeholder management. I worked closely with product managers, engineers, designers, and Praxia's own leadership team, and oversaw the work through to handover for development and launch.

The Core Challenge

This project had three hard problems running simultaneously, each capable of derailing the work on its own.

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Trust. In a market shaped by financial crisis, every interaction, onboarding, account management, transfers, savings, had to actively build confidence rather than assume it. Tone, transparency, and the feeling of security were as important as usability. Many users weren't just unfamiliar with app-based banking; some were actively resistant to it.

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Regulatory complexity. The Greek financial regulatory environment, covering Bank of Greece requirements, PSD2, and AML compliance, is both demanding and, in places, genuinely in tension with the frictionless experience challenger banks are known for. Working out what could be simplified, what had to be preserved, and how to present regulatory requirements in a way that felt like protection rather than obstruction was an ongoing design challenge throughout.

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Stakeholder alignment. Praxia was a startup with strong founder opinions and a leadership team whose vision for the product was still developing as the design work progressed. Maintaining momentum while managing expectations about what was achievable within real constraints required confident, clear creative leadership and the occasional frank conversation about scope.

The Decisions That Mattered

We designed trust as a system, not a screen. Rather than treating trust as something addressed by a single onboarding moment or a security badge, we embedded it throughout the entire experience. Tone of voice, data transparency, clear explanations of regulatory steps, and a visual language that felt grounded rather than flashy: all of these were deliberate decisions made in service of a user base that needed to feel safe before they would engage.

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We made regulatory compliance a visible feature, not an obstacle. Where competitors minimised or obscured compliance steps, we took a different approach, making Praxia's regulatory rigour visible as a reassurance. In a market where financial institutions had lost credibility by appearing to bend rules, a bank that was openly, clearly compliant had a genuine positioning advantage. The compliance moments in the journey were designed to feel like they were on the user's side.

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We front-loaded alignment before design reviews. Given the stakeholder complexity, we ran structured workshops to establish shared product principles before presenting any design work. By the time concepts were on screen, the criteria for evaluating them had already been agreed, which kept decision-making focused on outcomes rather than personal preference. It's a discipline that requires more patience upfront and saves considerable grief later.