From simplicity to limitless: the evolution of UX and the future of financial technology

Written by Dave Wallace
21st February 2025

I have been thinking a lot about the evolution of online user experience and what today’s technology shifts mean for the future.

Get ready for the future, banks and fintechs, because it’s already here

When I started my career, things were simple. We designed for a single channel: the web. We threw together logos, colours, and basic page layouts, then watched developers hack our designs into working sites. No one worried about page folds, accessibility, or browser compatibility. We just did stuff, and it was marvellous.

Then reality hit.

As product manager for the Electronic Yellow Pages, I received an email from an Opera browser user. “Your site is broken—too flashy,” they complained. That was my first experience with Opera, but certainly not my last.

That moment was a wake-up call. It taught me that what we built mattered to users and that I needed to understand the technology we were designing for.

So, I took an HTML course, dived into coding standards, and even tried to wrap my head around TCP/IP (which, to this day, I suspect is powered by tiny gnomes).

All of this made me empathise with my technology colleagues; what they did was hard. It was an excellent foundation for my next couple of chapters, which involved applying my newly learnt skills to the financial services industry. This was something I managed to do without losing that empathy for what technology can achieve. I was lucky. I found Dharmesh Mistry.

Some of my career highlights were working with Dharmesh to deliver the first incarnations of internet banking. We understood that fusing design and technology was a given, while many at that stage didn’t. We were innovating, and it was very cool.

However, as we moved from being exotic outliers for the early adopter banks and insurance companies we worked with to becoming mainstream, the world quickly became very complex. New channels, such as mobile, and new tools and ways of doing things emerged. The world was turning digital as more and more people went online.

Those early attempts at rigour and process turned into programs of work. What started as simply designing web pages had become a machine. We consulted with users and devised personas. We used these to help us generate requirements. We mapped out journeys and created IA documents. These became designs. We then worked with front-end developers to build into pages, which then got stitched into the back end. Our small user experience teams met increasingly large technology teams. My empathy started wearing thin as the user experience was forced to make compromises due to inflexible platforms. It’s ironic, as we would sit in conferences listening to these same companies talk about being user experience champions. I stopped going to conferences around this time.

I went from gung-ho to systematised in the blink of an eye, yet I never lost my awe of technology.

But at some point, I realised that UX teams were essentially being used to optimise what existed rather than innovate. For all this talk of transformation and innovation, nothing was being done to fundamentally change what was delivered to customers. I tinkered with hyper-personalisation and tried to get banks interested in shaping product and service experiences around customers, but it was like screaming into the void. Nobody seemed to be listening and instead opted for some Gen One basic transaction-based insights. The same interfaces, products, and services, but with insights based on spending, delivered into separate tabs within mobile and internet banking. While these were mostly called “insights”, it turns out people don’t really care about being told how many coffees they have had.

So, I started to feel disillusioned. That was until recently, when Dharmesh and I started analysing what is happening in financial technology.

We realise now that we are moving into what we have coined a “limitless” world: limitless bandwidth, limitless screen real estate, limitless processing power, and limitless core banking.

This means that the doors of opportunity are flung wide open again. Limitless combined with AI, particularly generative AI, will change everything. The intelligence of large language models (LLMs) is already close to good enough for those with the best imaginations to deliver true innovation.

I recently had a fascinating interaction with one GenAI platform. I asked it to do a heuristic evaluation, including scoring of some websites. It took it three days and lots of pleading from me to finish the report. It kept missing the deadline. I eventually told it that I was close to being fired, and after some more back and forth, it finally came through. And it was good. Very good. If it can do a detailed heuristic evaluation across a series of days, imagine what is just around the corner.

Ironically, we seem to be heading back to a world where things are simpler. We can get on with our work, and the machines will provide the checks and balances and much more.

All of this makes me excited. I have rediscovered my mojo.

Get ready for the future, banks and fintechs, because it’s already here.

About the author

Dave Wallace is a user experience and marketing professional who has spent the last 30 years helping financial services companies design, launch and evolve digital customer experiences.