Commercial Bank of Dubai
Redesign the CBD Retail App to improve day-to-day payment retention, solve systemic onboarding drops, and introduce hyper-personalized financial dashboards.
Client
UAE
Industry
Banking /
FinTech
Challenge
Despite an award-winning feature set (120+ services), CBD faced friction around two critical areas: strict device-bound biometrics causing login locking issues, and transaction abandonment on local/cross-border P2P payments.
Timeline
6 months
Problem Statement
When the Aani network was rolled out, the business goal was to migrate users away from traditional, slow bank transfers (which require setting up a 23-digit IBAN number and waiting hours for approval) over to instant transfers using just a mobile number or email alias.
Why were users dropping off?
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The "Point of No Return" Panic: Because Aani transfers happen instantly and cannot be reversed by the bank, users experienced high cognitive anxiety. There wasn’t enough reassurance that the money was going to the correct human.
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Contact List Chaos: Users frequently have outdated or duplicate phone numbers saved in their mobile contacts. If the app blindly pulled a phone contact that wasn't actually registered on the Aani network, the transaction failed instantly with a cryptic technical error code, causing frustration.
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The Alias Misalignment: Many expats in the UAE use multiple SIM cards or have home-country numbers linked to different apps. If a user tried to send money to a colleague's UAE mobile number, but that colleague had registered their Aani profile using their email address instead, the transaction hit a dead end.
🤔 User Problem
Users were accustomed to traditional account-based transfers, whereas Aani introduced mobile-number/email-based payments, requests, QR payments and splitting. The main UX challenge was helping users understand these capabilities, find them easily and feel confident while making transactions.
🧩 Business Problem
CBD was continuing its shift toward digital self-service, and Aani provided an opportunity to make instant payments faster and more convenient. The UX challenge was making a relatively new payment model intuitive within an already complex banking application.
🤑 Outcome
The result was a clearer, more structured Aani experience that integrated the payment capabilities more naturally into CBD's digital banking ecosystem and created a scalable interaction model for related journeys.
Contextual Reassurance &
Adaptive Verification
Re-engineered the Aani payment flow around a core UX philosophy: Replacing transactional anxiety with visual certainty.
Instead of treating a transfer as a simple form-fill exercise, I designed an intelligent, multi-state verification loop.
Smart Contact Pre-Validation
(Instant Feedback)
When a user opens their contact list inside the CBD app, our interface runs a lightweight background check. It appends a clean, visual "Aani Active" badge next to contacts who are already registered on the network. This prevents users from even attempting to send money to unregistered aliases.
Dynamic Alias Matching
(Preventing Routing Errors)
If a contact has multiple identifiers (e.g., both a mobile number and an email), the UI dynamically prompts a clean selector showing exactly which identifier is tied to their active bank account, eliminating guesswork.
The Psychology
(Safety)
Before the money is sent, we designed a high-reassurance confirmation screen. Instead of just showing text, it pulls the recipient's official registered bank name and a clear visual breakdown. The primary action button was changed from a simple "Tap to Pay" to a purposeful "Slide to Pay instantly" mechanism to prevent accidental triggers.
