Designing the concepts that would extend Apple Pay
In 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 Dot’s to actually move money from anywhere to anywhere. The project would evolve into nearly 2 years of concept development, technical feasibility assessments & 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 free of distractions and white 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, including this integration with Apple Wallet (right) that would store retailer credit. Currently hundreds of millions of people use this core iOS feature I helped build on the Green Dot backend.
Working in fin-tech for over 10 years 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 experiences that 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 is nuts.