At Cardless we’re making consumer credit more accessible, useful and engaging. To date we have launched several credit cards with our partners, such as the Boston Celtics, Liverpool FC and the Cleveland Cavaliers. We also launched our first airline program together with LATAM Airlines, with more brands in a variety of verticals to come!

What we’ve been up to

We’ve rethought the entire Cardless customer experience end-to-end. Our mobile and web apps— where cardholders manage their accounts — were the cornerstone of this initiative. We want to give cardholders a simple yet powerful experience and instantly connect them to the brands they love.

We haven’t solved everything, but we’re really proud of the work we’ve been doing. As an introduction we’d love to share some of our principles.

Focus on brands

Cardless connects people to the brands they love. Because this connection is such a core component of the product, we sought to highlight the brands themselves in our product surfaces. People should feel right at home when interacting with one of our products — all while having a consistent and recognizably “Cardless” experience.

This duality in focus meant we had to be very conscious about when and how we communicate branding in our product. After much experimentation, we settled on a systematic approach in which we theme key aspects of the interface with color. This was an especially hard problem to solve. Too distinctive of an approach can lead to a product where we can’t reliably control the level of experience everyone will have. Too little and we wouldn’t be living up to our promise.

It was also challenging to reach a solution that scales well for both Design and Engineering, but we’re excited for this system to be used for many financial products across countless brands in the future.

Empower our cardholders

Traditional consumer credit can be confusing and difficult to navigate. With Cardless, we seek to overturn this norm: we aim to establish long-lasting, transparent relationships that empower people to make healthy financial decisions. This redesign moves us closer to that goal — to surface and parse information when relevant and better explain challenging topics.

By making financial products fun and confidence-inspiring, we can give people the right amount of guidance to be well-informed and in control. We’re entrusted to offer an experience that lives up to — and builds on — the reputation of a brand. When our cardholders win, so do the brands that launch with us.

Speak visually

Financial software can be complicated and overwhelm people with information. Consumer credit, in particular, is a space with many rules and regulations designed to protect consumers.

Working in such a tightly regulated industry represents an interesting challenge from a Product Design perspective. We like to simplify, but we have to do so in a way that doesn’t abstract key details. Doing the right thing is something we value highly in our business and in the design of our products.

We’re intentional with how we leverage visual elements to surface important information and avoid overwhelming people with long-form text throughout the experience. We’ll continuously challenge ourselves to improve here, but are beyond excited for the first rendition to be in the hands of members soon!

Massive thank you to the amazing Quynh for helping write & edit this post.