How we built the new LemFi App

How do we make the LemFi app show up as we really are?

That question started everything.

We had a problem. Our users knew us as a remittance app. But we were becoming so much more. We were building and launching new financial products, designed to support our users’ lives beyond sending money home.

The problem? Nobody knew.

Our users came to LemFi with one mission: send money home. Get in. Get it done. Get on with life.

They weren’t coming to explore. And they certainly weren’t scrolling below the fold to discover all the new things we’d been building for them.

We were becoming a multiproduct financial app. But our experience was still telling a single-product story.

So I made this our team’s main OKR: solve that disconnect. Make our product experience reflect our business ambition. And more importantly, make sure our users could see the value we were creating for them.

Start with a story worth telling.

Whenever I approach a big project, I ask one question:

What’s going to make us famous?

Not because we want attention for the sake of it. But because a great product should have a story worth telling. What would the headline say when we launched? Why would anyone care?

For me, the story was simple.

We weren’t redesigning an app. We were removing the biggest barrier between what LemFi was becoming and what our users believed we could do for them.

We wanted to show that we were building for their ambitions. For their lives across borders. For everything pushing them forward.

Familiar. Unexpected. Unmistakably LemFi.

After a few workshops, the design team landed on an idea that became the foundation for the entire experience.

Our principles were simple. The execution was anything but.

1. 1. Take something familiar. Give it a twist. We turned stacked frames, part of our visual language, into an intuitive way to discover and navigate products. Familiar in behaviour. Distinctive in experience.
2. 2. Be bold enough to be remembered. We used brand colours to give each product its own identity, making the experience tactile, playful and unmistakably LemFi.
3. 3. Make the product the brand. Not branding applied to an interface, but brand built into every interaction. Obsessing over the smallest details.
4. 4. Build a system. Then be ruthless about it. We reduced components to their simplest, cleanest form. A benevolent dictatorship of design, balancing flexibility with uncompromising consistency.
5. 5. Make communication a creative act. We used unexpected illustrations, humour and delight to make financial products feel more human.
6. 6. Give content a seat at the design table. Words and visuals working together. Because explaining value matters just as much as delivering it.
7. 7. Make motion meaningful. Not animation for decoration, but small moments of reward that make every interaction feel satisfying.
8. 8. Turn a mascot into a strategic asset. We brought Lemy, our shapeshifting lemon, into the support experience. Giving our users a familiar, friendly character to engage with.
9. 9. Simplify. Test. Learn. Polish. Repeat. We let real user behaviour challenge our assumptions and refine the experience, down to the smallest detail.
10. 10. Design for today. Learn for tomorrow. Build on familiar patterns and acquired behaviours, while creating a foundation that can keep evolving long after launch.

And we went all in.

Every button. Every interaction. Every little animation. Our original design team, Ivan, Oluwatobi, Becky and Constance, became obsessed with detail because detail isn’t decoration. Detail is how people experience care.

What started as an ambition to make our products more visible became something much bigger: a full product expansion, delivered in six months.

We are not Revolut. We are not Monzo. We are LemFi.

Early on, we looked closely at user sentiment and brand loyalty.

One thing became clear: if we wanted people to stick with us, we had to give them more reasons to.

Not more features for the sake of more features. More value. More relevance. More care in every interaction.

We weren’t trying to become another neobank. We were building something for a very different kind of ambition.

For people building lives between countries. People moving money, opportunities and possibilities across borders. People going places, in life and across continents.

Because the future of LemFi isn’t just about moving money. It’s about moving people forward.

And that’s the story we wanted our new app to tell.

Not just in a campaign. Not just in a headline.

In every single experience.