When one design has to feel local everywhere

20 million users,
7 markets, one product

BBVA operates across Spain, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay and the US. Each market brings different regulations, different competitive pressures, and — more subtly — different mental models around money itself.

Take something as fundamental as transfers. In Spain, most people think in monthly cycles. In Mexico, salaries are paid fortnightly and credit cards carry more of everyday spending than debit. The same feature, the same screen — but the hierarchy of information, the defaults, and the language around credit and debt needed to reflect a completely different financial reality. Getting that wrong at 20M users isn't a UX problem, it's a trust problem.

As Senior Product Designer I worked across 100+ features — dashboard, transfers, product detail, account management — while supervising the Peru design team's adaptation work. The real output wasn't just the screens. It was the documentation, guidelines and adaptation frameworks that let 8 country teams build consistently — enabling 90%+ component reuse without a centralised bottleneck.

My Trips — tap a destination to see automatic expense tracking, currency breakdown and integrated financial product recommendations.

BBVA had every transaction a customer made while travelling. Users had none of it in a usable form — they were manually piecing together what they'd spent, in which currency, across multiple trips. My Trips surfaced it automatically: expenses by destination, budget tracking, currency breakdown, all linked to the financial products they might actually need.

I led the feature from research to launch in Spain (August 2019). The insight was that travel isn't just a moment — it's a financial context. Connecting that context to BBVA's products (insurance, loans, currency conversion) turned a utility feature into a revenue driver.

Android watch and Apple Watch running BBVA — dashboard and product detail adapted for a 42mm form factor. Dark mode palette designed from scratch, later adopted as the mobile system foundation.

The Watch app wasn't a compressed version of mobile — it required rethinking what banking means at a glance. What does a user actually need to know on a 42mm screen, in the three seconds they look at their wrist, without taking their phone out?

I led the adaptation for both Android watches and Apple Watch, designing a new dark-mode design system from scratch. The 60+ reusable components built for watchOS became the foundation for the mobile dark mode system — work that compounded across the entire platform.

Three parallel journeys designed simultaneously — BBVA client, non-client with app, and non-client without app — each with different permissions and entry points.

Splitting expenses with friends was a solved problem. Tricount, Splitwise, Venmo — all of them let you track who owes what. What none of them could do was close the loop: settle the debt immediately, without leaving the app, because the money was already there. That's the only thing a bank can do that a fintech can't.

I led the feature from research through design. The core interaction was straightforward — create a group, add expenses, split them. But the real complexity was invisible on the surface: not everyone in a group is a BBVA customer. That meant designing three parallel experiences simultaneously — an existing client, a non-client who already had the app, and a non-client who didn't — each with different permissions, different entry points, and different incentives to convert.

The feature shipped two to three years after I left, with small adjustments along the way. The core design held.

Previous landing screen (left) and new redesigned landing with personalised post-login state, QR access and communication space (right).

The landing screen is the first thing a potential BBVA customer sees — and it has to convert across markets with different propositions, regulations and competitive contexts. The challenge wasn't designing a good screen; it was designing a flexible system that each market could adapt without losing the brand or the conversion logic.

I led the full experience: information architecture, user flows and visual design. The new landing introduced a personalised post-login state, surfaced QR operations at the entry point, and created a new communication space between BBVA and its customers that hadn't existed before in the app.