RETAIL BANKING APP
A year leading design across 6 Agile squads at RAKBANK, spanning CASA, Cards, Loans, and Digital Banking. This case study covers the work that defined that role: the UAE's first end-to-end digital personal loan journey, the EPP digital instalment journey, the launch of the Elevate Credit Card, and the design process I embedded into the bank's Agile delivery.
/// RAKBANK was pushing to digitise core products and reduce branch dependency. Personal loans, instalment plans, and credit card applications were still paper-heavy or branch-bound. The bank needed end-to-end digital journeys that could compete with neo-banks entering the UAE market, while staying compliant with Central Bank regulations.
/// Working across six Agile squads in parallel meant six different product directions, six different priorities, and six different definitions of "done." Design quality was drifting between streams. The bank also had no shared design process embedded into Agile delivery, designers were brought in late, often after engineering had already scoped solutions. Regulatory constraints added friction at every step.
/// I led design across all six squads, managing one designer per squad through weekly alignment forums, 1-1s, peer review, and design critique. I acted as the sign-off gate before final approval by the Head of Design, ensuring consistency across customer-facing streams. I co-created the bank's design process with the Head of Design and embedded it into Agile delivery, socialising the framework with Product Owners across squads. I introduced a design debt tracking system to surface and pay down quality issues before they shipped.
/// The EPP digital instalment journey shipped end-to-end, with 78.27% of instalments now submitted digitally, worth 146.09M AED. The UAE's first end-to-end digital personal loan journey contributed to 8.3M AED in disbursed loans. The Elevate Credit Card launched with a fully digital application flow. The design process now runs across all six squads with quality sign-off gates and the design debt tracking system in active use.
