‘We’ve been lifted from the Dark Ages’ – Why Vanquis Bank is banking on Figma

As designers know all too well, creating and maintaining an app is rife with challenges. With different designers responsible for different user journeys – all of which are seamlessly stitched together to create a cohesive whole – it’s difficult to keep updates and style tweaks synced when working outside of a cloud-native environment. Add a pandemic to the mix, and a complete switch to full remote working, and the ability to work collaboratively gets that much harder.

For brands in the financial services space, the challenge is ten-fold. Being such a heavily regulated environment, the need to have a fully recorded paper trail of each and every design change is essential. In the UK, it’s something that the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) can ask for at any moment – a request that fills many design teams with weeks upon weeks of version control-related admin.

A business well versed in these challenges is Vanquis Bank – the bank making responsible lines of credit available for all. Their design team have been busy launching and updating the Vanquis banking app and website, all whilst maintaining day to day design operations.

After almost a year of remote working with its incumbent software set up – a mix of a number of well-known platforms – Vanquis decided to give Figma’s web-based design tools a try. From day one of testing Figma, Vanquis’ designers knew they would never look back. In just three months, Vanquis has achieved design collaboration that they never thought possible, and has overcome a number of perennial design challenges in the process.

We caught up with Andrew Larking, Vanquis’ Lead UX & UI designer and Sienna Collins, Senior UX Designer, to find out how Figma has transformed the bank’s approach to design, as well as the ROI Vanquis is seeing. Here are our top takeaways:

Collaboration… on steroids!

When it comes to something as essential as a banking app, there are thousands of different variables a user journey can take. Each one is meticulously designed and integrated into the wider user experience, and can take many weeks to get off the ground.

Before using Figma, Vanquis’ designers would design these user journeys offline in isolation, uploading them to the cloud at the end of the day and trusting that they would integrate neatly with the journeys other designers had created. It was an inefficient process, meaning that when Vanquis transitioned to Figma, the ability to work on the same journeys and projects at the same time was revolutionary – a process that took weeks now takes days. To quote Andrew: “It’s collaborative design on steroids! It feels like we’re in a room together with a whiteboard again – Figma has truly lifted us from the Dark Ages.”

This sense of collaboration hasn’t only been felt by the design team – Figma’s web-based architecture has made the entire company design-driven, too. Viewing designs is no longer the preserve of those with specific software tools and hardware; as long as they have a web-enabled device, anyone in the business – be it marketing, sales, operations, or IT – can view and collaborate on designs in real time. And, as the entire business is hooked up to Figma, it means that when house design styles are updated, they are synced to each and every employee automatically.

As design no longer exists in a silo within the business – collaboration with each and every department happens effortlessly, and design has now become a key enabler of Vanquis Bank and its growth.

Streamlined operations like never before

For any designer in the financial services space, an impromptu FCA audit can cause all other design plans and timelines to be cast aside. Version control history of each and every change made in the app is required for review, alongside time stamps, names of designers, and an overview of how they’re in keeping with FCA regulations. It’s a complex, time-consuming, and costly process, requiring dozens of project managers and designers to collate the required assets –a process that can take days or even weeks.

But thanks to Figma’s automated version control option, this information can be collated in an instant. According to Andrew, “A year’s subscription to Figma has paid for itself ten-fold following just one FCA audit alone. A process that could have taken the team a couple of weeks can now be completed in a day with one designer, allowing the rest of the team to continue working on future-looking design work.”

This isn’t the only part of Vanquis that Figma has changed for the better – it has streamlined design operations for the app and wider business too. The use of design tokens, shared style systems, and component libraries have sped up the production and sign off of designs across multiple channels for multiple audiences. No matter how customers engage with Vanquis digitally, whether it’s web, app, e-mail or social, Figma is at the heart of it.

ROI.. and then some!

No business feels the pressure to showcase strong return on investment than those operating in the financial services space. For Vanquis, the ROI seen from its investment in Figma is already apparent. Design processes have sped up by 110%. Errors made in development due to poor hand-off have reduced significantly. Figma costs just a quarter of their previous design tooling. And as design scales across more teams, looking after more products, this ROI is going to scale accordingly. “The pounds and pence cost of design is primarily in the time taken to produce it. Here we’ve seen massive increases in productivity and in the quality of the work we produce. That is down to the tool itself. The collaboration elements, everything living in one place, but also the amazing community Figma has built.

“The other cost of design is in the mistakes and the lost opportunities. Because Figma has made developer handoff and engagement so much better, and has sped us up so drastically, it has given us the confidence to play with design again. We have time to really study our work, to spend with customers, to test more iterations. From that you discover and create opportunities that can have significant customer or business value, especially in finance. You can’t do any of that if you’re spending hours a day fighting your tools.”

It’s thanks to a multitude of factors, with the boost in collaboration and streamlined operations resulting in the greatest ROI boost of all: time. Whether it’s saving Product Managers literal weeks in identifying and collating component links, or enabling app updates to be synced in real time with no need for maintenance downtime, Vanquis’ design team finally have the time to look forward.

Tasks that kept falling to the bottom of the priority list – such as refreshing design palettes, testing out different user journeys, or experimenting with different user experiences – are now back on the agenda. And because the design team are no longer weighed down by the admin associated with creating new components, entire new user journeys and capabilities can be created with ease, enabling Vanquis to create a user experience like never before.

“Without Figma, the launch of our new digital services quite simply wouldn’t have been possible in this amount of time, let alone carrying out future thinking and innovation work. Figma has transformed our approach to design considerably, and whilst we’ve got access to all the standard design tools out there still, consolidating all of our design operations onto one platform is the best thing that we’ve ever done,” Andrew followed.