Anticipo POS: Financial Access at the Point of Sale

Designing a Novel Financial Product for SMB Owners at BBVA Perú

Industry Fintech · SMB Banking · Enterprise Financial Products

Client BBVA Perú

Context

In 2021, BBVA identified a significant gap in its SMB product portfolio: small business owners who processed sales through BBVA's POS terminal had no path to digital credit evaluation, and no access to a fully digital loan product. Traditional credit scoring excluded many of these merchants, and the origination process was entirely manual and in-person. Anticipo POS was designed to close this gap — creating a financial product where the merchant's own POS transaction history served as the credit evaluation basis, and where the full lifecycle (application, approval, payment) could be completed digitally. It would become the first BBVA Perú product fully payable online, end-to-end.

The Challenge

The hardest design problem was not building the interface — it was making a novel, unfamiliar financial product intelligible to users who had no prior reference for how it worked. Anticipo POS was a new product category in Peru. Unlike a standard personal loan, it involved a credit model based on POS transaction volume rather than traditional credit history, and automatic payment deduction from future POS settlements — a repayment mechanism users had never encountered. The risk was high: if users didn't understand the product's mechanics at the moment of contracting, BBVA would face complaints, chargebacks and regulatory exposure. Clarity was not a UX preference — it was a business and compliance requirement. Additional complexity came from the co-creation model: BBVA Perú was building this product in parallel with the holding design team, requiring continuous alignment across organizations with different priorities, timelines and design standards.

My Role

I led UX design for the full product scope across four deliverable areas: the contracting journey from product discovery to signature, the loan-tracking dashboard with transaction history and payment monitoring, the payment flow (the first fully digital loan repayment at BBVA Perú), and transactional email communications aligned to BBVA's design system. I also owned the content strategy and produced a comprehensive Content Deck documenting all copy decisions and their regulatory rationale. A significant part of my role was managing the multi-stakeholder alignment process — scheduling iterative reviews with legal, marketing, security and the holding design team to ensure every content decision was both legally precise and user-comprehensible.

Strategic Approach

The central design strategy was to treat content design as a structural component of the UX — not a finishing step. Before any visual design decisions were made, I invested in understanding the product's legal and financial mechanics deeply, working directly with legal and product teams to establish a shared vocabulary for the user-facing layer. The key principle I applied was recognition over recall: every screen had to make the product's mechanics self-evident at the moment of interaction, without requiring users to remember information from a previous step. This translated into persistent summary modules that displayed key loan terms at every stage of the contracting flow, progressive revelation of how automatic payment deduction worked — introduced contextually, at the moment users were most likely to ask — and a dynamic information architecture that adapted to each user's POS transaction profile. The co-creation process with the holding team was managed as a structured alignment protocol: I adapted their existing design assets to the Peruvian regulatory and cultural context, ensuring the product remained within BBVA's global design system while meeting local requirements. The final design was approved by the holding design team as a globally scalable pattern.

Impact