Open Banking Infrastructure Design
Role
Product Designer
Duration
5 months
Year
2023
Overview
Lean Technologies is Saudi Arabia's leading open banking infrastructure provider. I designed the developer portal, bank connection flows, and consumer consent UX that powers open banking integrations across the Saudi banking ecosystem.
Project Details
The Problem
Fintech developers integrating with Saudi banks faced a fragmented, documentation-poor experience — spending days on setup that should take hours. Meanwhile, consumer-facing bank connection flows had low conversion rates due to unclear consent language and friction-heavy authentication steps.
The Goal
Design a developer experience that makes integrating Saudi open banking APIs as intuitive as integrating Stripe — and design a consumer bank connection flow that converts at best-in-class rates by making the consent process transparent, fast, and trustworthy.
Research Insights
What the research revealed.
Developer Onboarding Friction
Developers integrating Lean's API for the first time took an average of 3.2 days to complete their first successful data request — a barrier that was causing 30% to abandon before going live.
Consumer Trust Deficit
60% of Saudi consumers surveyed said they would not connect their bank account to a third-party app — primarily due to fear of unauthorized access and unclear data usage.
Bank UI Fragmentation
Each Saudi bank had a completely different authentication flow — users moving between bank connections experienced jarring transitions that eroded confidence in the overall integration.
Design Process
How it was built.
Wireframes
Mapped two parallel journeys: the developer integration flow (from API key generation to first data call) and the consumer bank connection flow (from app permission request through bank authentication to data consent).
User Flows
Designed 4 developer flows (onboarding, integration guide, sandbox testing, go-live checklist) and 3 consumer flows (bank selection, authentication, consent management). Both were tested with real developer and consumer participants.
Iterations
Consumer flow underwent 5 iterations — the most difficult design challenge was normalizing the UX across 12 different bank authentication patterns while maintaining a consistent Lean brand experience.
Final Solution
The delivered product.
A developer portal redesign featuring interactive API documentation, a guided integration wizard, and a sandbox environment — paired with a consumer bank connection flow that achieves industry-leading conversion through transparency-first consent design.
Interactive API documentation with live code examples in 3 languages
Guided integration wizard reducing time-to-first-call from 3.2 days to 4 hours
Consumer consent flow with plain-language permission explanations
Universal bank connection UI that normalizes 12 different bank authentication flows
Design Decisions
Why these choices were made.
Plain-Language Consent over Legal Copy
Replacing legal permission text with conversational explanations ('We can see your account balance, but we cannot move your money') increased consumer connection completion by 3.1×.
Progressive Disclosure in Documentation
Hiding advanced configuration options behind 'show more' patterns reduced cognitive overload for new developers — 83% of users who saw the simplified view completed their first integration vs 47% with the full view.
Universal Auth Wrapper
Rather than passing users to raw bank authentication UIs, we designed a Lean-branded wrapper that provides consistent navigation, progress indication, and error recovery — regardless of which bank's authentication system is underneath.
Outcomes
The results.
Integration Time
−87%
Reduction in developer time-to-first-API-call
Consumer Conversion
+210%
Improvement in bank connection completion rate
Banks Supported
12
Saudi banks with normalized connection UX
Developer NPS
68
Net promoter score from developer community
Reflection & Next Steps
What I learned.
Lean showed me the power of API UX — a discipline that exists at the intersection of developer experience and consumer psychology. The insight that changed everything was realizing that consumer trust in an open banking flow is earned not by the fintech app, but by the clarity of the connection moment itself. Designing that moment well — the 5 seconds where a user decides whether to connect their bank — is worth more than any downstream feature.
Next Steps
Design an embedded open banking widget for third-party app integration
Create a self-serve developer sandbox with pre-populated test data
Build a consent management dashboard for consumers to audit and revoke access