Pine Labs · Whitelabel fintech · Under NDA
CardHolder App
A card app Pine Labs could sell to any bank, designed for customers they had not met yet, in a market where a competitor already had one.
- Role
- End to end product design
- Ownership
- Sole designer, Credit+ vertical
- Worked with
- PM, engineering, sales
- Timeline
- Around 2 months
Every screen on this page exists in light and dark. Use the toggle above to switch.
The problem
Pine Labs wanted a whitelabel card app to sell to banks. A competitor already had one and Credit+ had nothing to put in the room. The brief was simple and the constraint was not. Build a complete product across credit cards, forex cards and credit lines, in light and dark, for a client who did not exist yet, whose brand, priorities and existing systems were all unknown.
Why it was hard
There was no client to design for
No brief to react to, no brand guidelines, no users to interview. Every decision had to come from reading the market: what banks already offered, what their apps already did, and what a buyer would expect to see before believing this was real.
Every feature had to be removable
Features could not be designed as parts of one product. Each had to work as a module a bank could switch off, reorder or keep. That made grouping and hierarchy the actual work, because a badly grouped app collapses the moment you subtract from it.
Universal and adaptable at the same time
The UI had to be distinctive enough to demo convincingly and neutral enough to disappear under someone else's brand. Every visual call was an informed one rather than an expressive one, across three card products, each in light and dark.
The call I made
I designed every feature to be taken out.
With no client, the real question was never what the app should look like. It was what a bank could remove without the rest falling over. Grouping and hierarchy got the time that polish usually gets.
Design the best card app I could. One coherent, opinionated product, the way you would for a single client. Faster to make, better looking, and easier to walk someone through in a pitch.
Design a skeleton plus modules. Every feature switchable, reorderable and reskinnable, with grouping strong enough that subtracting a feature never left a hole where it used to be.
What shipped
Card Controls.
Domestic and international limits, channel by channel. The trust surface of any card app.
Convert to EMI.
Six tenures, priced and tagged, so the choice is made in one screen rather than a call centre.
Currency Conversion.
A module that exists only in the forex product, running inside the same shell as the rest.
How it landed
Delivered as one working prototype, with the entire app stitched together so sales could demo a product end to end instead of clicking through slides. Pitched to public sector banks. I left Pine Labs before finding out whether any converted, and that is a sales outcome rather than a design one.
screens designed, light and dark
card products in one modular system
months, solo, end to end
Scope rather than impact. This was a pre sales product, so there are no usage figures to report. A further 60+ credit line screens were produced for a specific bank's pitch.
Leadership wanted to test how fast the vertical could ship, so the screens were built out DhiWise and Vercel compatible. Because the system underneath was consistent, a missing screen or a new scenario could be generated from it rather than drawn by hand. I also argued for a configuration layer that would let Pine Labs sell features rather than only the whole app, offering something like a currency converter as a widget to a bank that already has an app and does not want another. That one was not built before I left.
In hindsight
I designed the app as modules, but nothing existed to configure them, so every reskin still needed a designer in the loop. The configuration layer I proposed was the missing half of the idea, and I would have liked to be the one to build it.