CIB Pay · Cairo, Egypt · 2022–2023
Case Study · 03

Egypt's first
mobile bank.
Almost.

We rebuilt it from zero. Shipped it through testing. Watched the window close.

Role
Lead Product Designer
Team
1 PM · 6 engineers · 1 designer (me)
Year
2022 — 2023
Platform
iOS · Android · Arabic/RTL first
Scope
End-to-end product · Research · Design system
The Brief

They already had a design.
We threw it out.

CIB hired an agency before I joined. The deliverable was forty-plus screens of polished UI. It looked like a banking app. It didn't think like one.

I spent the first month reading it. Clicking through it. Running it past the engineers who'd have to build it, and the customer service team who'd have to support it. Both teams said the same thing, in different words: this doesn't match how people actually use CIB.

So we started over. Not a redesign. A rebuild.

The Homescreen

One user.
Six cards.
One screen.

A single CIB customer could hold a debit card, a credit card, a prepaid card, a dollar card, a business card, and a joint account — sometimes all six at once. The agency design stacked them in a list. It worked for someone with two cards. It collapsed for someone with six.

I redesigned the homescreen nine times. Carousel. Tabs. Grid. Grouped by type. Grouped by usage. Each version solved one user and broke another.

The version that shipped to testing wasn't the most beautiful. It was the one nobody got lost in.

The CIB Pay homescreen that shipped to testing — total balance, card carousel, quick actions, recent transactions
Iteration nine — the one that shipped to testing
The Cards

Six cards
meant six of everything.

Every card carried its own limits, controls, and history — so the card detail screen became the app's real workhorse. Balance and limit up top, Tap to Pay one toggle away, and every control on the card itself instead of buried in settings.

The controls screen came straight from the customer service team's pain list: online transactions, international payments, contactless — switches, not support calls.

CIB Pay — Card detail screen
CIB Pay — Card controls screen
The Everyday

Pay with the phone.
Find it again later.

Tap to Pay got a full screen and nothing else — one NFC pulse, the selected card, no distractions at the terminal. The moment is stressful enough.

And history got the treatment banks always skip: grouped by day, filterable by card, every merchant recognizable at a glance. The screen people actually open every week.

CIB Pay — Tap to Pay screen
CIB Pay — History screen
The Stall

Then we waited
for approval.

By mid-2023 the product was through internal testing. Engineers had shipped the build. Employees were using it. A beta cohort of customers was lined up. We were waiting on the Central Bank of Egypt.

Compliance reviews in Egyptian banking don't run on product timelines. They run on their own clock. We watched the weeks pass. We kept iterating. We waited.

While we waited, Apple Pay launched in Egypt. The window we were aiming at closed from the outside.

What I took from it

Now I test
before I'm allowed to.

CIB Pay is the reason I run user testing earlier and more often than any process document asks me to. Employees. Real customers. Recruited strangers. Anyone who'll sit with the screen for twenty minutes.

Not because testing would have saved the launch. It wouldn't have. The thing that killed us was outside the product entirely.

But every decision I made in those nine homescreen iterations came from watching someone struggle with the previous one. That's the only part of the project I got to keep. I kept it.

Next case
CIB Intranet →