Case Study: Banking connect widget UX

Role: Led UX/UI design for the Banking Connect Widget as part of a 2-designer team, enabling users to easily and securely link their financial accounts to client applications.
Year: 2021-2022

What is the Banking Connect Widget?

Belvo’s Banking connect widget is the front door to its core product: a flow that enables users to connect their bank accounts and authorize access to their financial data.

Problem

In Latin American markets, many users were uncertain or hesitant about sharing financial data, especially in an embedded, partner-driven experience. The existing flow was technical and generic, leading to:

• High drop-off rates mid-consent flow
• Low understanding of what was happening
• Increased legal & support risk due to UX ambiguity

Process & Design Highlights

• Mapped full flow across dozens of banking institutions, handling variations in authentication and consent
• Led user research on consent patterns in LatAm to inform language and framing
• Created new visual identity for the flow to emphasize trust and clarity
• Designed step-based UX, breaking complex flow into clear, digestible moments
• Optimized for mobile-first experience, the most common access point
• Created configurable components to support multiple partner contexts and branding needs

Outcome & Impact

The redesigned Banking Connect Widget improved user understanding of consent, increased completion rates by12% on key bank connectors, and significantly boosted overall flow completion. It also reduced legal escalations and support tickets, helping drive product adoption across key markets.

Key takeaways

• Applied UX for trust & transparency in a highly regulated domain
• Designed a flow used by millions of end users via Belvo’s API clients
• Balanced partner configurability with a strong core experience

Tools & stack

Figma, React components, Partner API integration

What I Learned

Designing for fintech consent taught me how to balance UX clarity, legal requirements, and technical constraints, all in a flow where trust is the product.

Features overview

Making a complex, high-risk action feel easy and transparent for the end user

Connect widget

The Connect Widget is the core entry point for Belvo’s banking data product, enabling users to link their bank accounts safely and with confidence. I focused on making this flow feel transparent and trustworthy, simplifying consent and security messaging to guide users through a high-friction, high-trust action.

Consent and links

This model illustrates how user consent is tied to each financial institution, creating a clear one-to-one relationship between what the user approves (consent) and what the application accesses (link). By decoupling user-managed consent from application-managed links, we ensured greater transparency, legal compliance, and developer control, a foundation for a secure and user-centric data-sharing experience.

How do users give consent?

This flow shows how we designed the Banking Connect Widget to guide users through a high-trust consent journey. Starting inside the client app, users launch the Belvo widget, select their institution, and review exactly what data they are sharing, all with clear, transparent language. The flow ensures consent is granted directly at the financial institution, reinforcing user trust. Once confirmed, the data flow is securely established between the institution and Belvo’s customer. The entire experience was optimized to feel intuitive, legally compliant, and user-controlled.

The flow above shows a real-world example of how users can view, manage, and revoke their data sharing consents with financial institutions. This level of transparency and self-service is critical for building trust in open finance experiences, and was a key principle in the design of the Banking Connect Widget and its ecosystem. The design helps users stay in control of their data by clearly surfacing:

• Which consents are active, pending, expired, or closed
• What data is being shared, with whom, and for what purpose
• When the consent was granted and its expiration timeline
• Available actions such as renewing, modifying, or revoking consent
  

Successful connection & next steps

Once the account is verified, users are brought back to a familiar environment where they can see which accounts are connected and start benefiting from the experience, whether that’s understanding their spending, accessing credit offers, or simply having their data synced.