Designing a zero-fee way for Ecuadorian migrants to send money home
2025
Payphone
Services
Interaction Design
Design Systems
Client
Payphone
Location
Ecuador
Year
2025
International Payment was a concept feature for Payphone Personal designed for Ecuadorians living abroad — primarily in the United States — who regularly send money to family back home. The product aimed to make that transfer instant, free via wallet, and available entirely from the phone they already use to collect payments. I led both the research and design for this project. Unlike most of my work at Payphone, where I was designing for users I could observe directly, this project required me to go to the community — conducting interviews with Ecuadorian migrants in the US to understand their actual experience before drawing a single screen.
Sending money from the United States to Ecuador typically means Western Union, a long queue, a fee of fifteen to twenty-five dollars per transfer, and a wait of three to five days before the money arrives. In smaller towns and rural areas, recipients often have to travel hours to reach a collection point. In some cases, funds intended for children end up in the hands of legal guardians who misuse them. The pain was not just inconvenience. It was a broken system that the people who depended on it had no power to change. They used it because there was nothing better — not because it worked. The design challenge was layered. First: understand the real experience of sending and receiving money across borders, which meant talking to people whose daily reality I had not lived. Second: design a transfer flow that felt trustworthy enough for someone to use it with money their family was counting on. Third: make the economics work — 0% fee on wallet transfers was the value proposition, and the entire product logic had to support it.
I started with research because I had to. I could not design a product for a community I did not understand, and assumptions here had real stakes. I conducted direct interviews with Ecuadorians living in the US — asking about their current process, what they trusted, what made them anxious about transferring money, and what would need to be true for them to switch to something new. What I heard was consistent. Trust was the first barrier. People had been burned by informal systems and had learned to be cautious. Speed mattered, but only after trust was established. The fee was important but not the first thing they mentioned — what came first was certainty: will this money actually arrive, and will it arrive to the right person. I mapped those insights into design principles before touching Figma. The flow had to confirm every step. The recipient had to be clearly identified, not just a phone number. The confirmation screen had to feel like a receipt, not a loading indicator. And the 0% fee had to be visible and explained — not buried in fine print that made people wonder what the catch was. After the first version of the flow was designed, I brought it back to the same users for review. Not a formal usability test — a conversation. I walked them through the screens and watched where they hesitated, what they read twice, what they skipped. We iterated twice based on that feedback before the flow reached a state where users said they would use it.
International payment did not ship. The project reached a validated concept stage — flows reviewed and iterated with real users, edge cases documented, handoff-ready in Figma — but was deprioritized before development began. That outcome is worth being honest about. A validated concept is not a shipped product, and I include this case study not to inflate my experience but because the process it represents — going to users before going to Figma, letting research drive structure, and iterating with the same people who gave you the original insight — is the part of my work I am most deliberate about. If Remesas ships one day, I hope it serves the people who told me what they needed. That is the only metric that would matter.
