Anticipo POS: Financial Access at the Point of Sale
Team Leadership and Content Design in a New Financial Product
Industry: Fintech · SMB Banking · Financial Products
Client: BBVA Perú
Year: 2023
Context
In 2021 BBVA identified a gap in its business portfolio: merchants taking payments through the bank’s POS terminal had no way to be assessed online and no access to fully digital financing. Traditional credit scoring left many of them out, and origination was still in-person and manual.
Anticipo POS was designed to close that gap with a different mechanism: the merchant’s own sales history serves as the basis for assessment, and the loan is repaid only when there are sales — 35% of each day’s takings, until the full amount is covered within a 120-day term. It would be BBVA Peru’s first product payable online from start to finish.
Anticipo POS came midway through the three years I spent leading design at BBVA Perú. For this product I led a team of four — a UX Designer, a Visual Designer, a Content Designer and a QA — and coordinated with the holding’s product leads on co-creating the first version to reach the Peruvian market.
A Product With No Precedent
The design problem wasn’t the interface. It was that no user had anything to compare this product to.
A personal loan makes sense because everyone knows one. Anticipo POS resembled nothing a Peruvian merchant had taken out before: the assessment looked at their sales rather than their credit history, and repayment wasn’t a fixed monthly instalment but a variable deduction from daily takings — which also didn’t happen on days without sales. Three new mechanisms at once.
The risk in that wasn’t a poor experience: it was regulatory. If the merchant didn’t understand how the deduction worked at the moment of signing, the result wouldn’t be frustration but complaints, chargebacks and exposure to the regulator. Clarity wasn’t a design preference; it was a product requirement.
Learning the Product Before Designing It
Before the team touched a single screen, I worked with the legal and product areas to understand the mechanism in every dimension: what exactly counts as a net sale, what happens on a day with no sales, what happens if the deduction doesn’t cover the accrued interest, what happens if the deadline arrives with an outstanding balance.
That groundwork is what made everything else possible. You can’t write clearly about something you don’t fully understand yourself, and in a regulated product every badly made simplification is a legal problem.
Showing the Mechanism Instead of Explaining It
The principle that shaped the design was that the user should recognize how the product works at the moment of using it, rather than having to remember something read three screens earlier.
The decision that most defined the product was not to explain the 35% deduction in words. Instead, the product shows it working: five days of real sales, with the corresponding charge for each one — including the day nothing was sold and therefore nothing was charged. The merchant sees the mechanism operating on concrete figures before committing to anything.
The same criterion shaped the simulation: at every step of the flow the summary of conditions stays visible —principal, interest, total payable, rate, deduction percentage and deadline— so that no decision depends on remembering a previous screen.
Four People Designing, Six Areas Approving
Every piece of copy in the product had to pass through six areas with different priorities: legal needed regulatory precision, security validated data handling, marketing looked after tone, risk defined the deduction mechanism, engineering scoped what was feasible and holding design demanded consistency with the global system. At the same time, the product was being built in parallel with the holding team, who were defining their own version.
Sustaining a four-person team working with that many reviewers meant decisions had to stop being argued on preference. For that I drove the approval of a Content Deck: a document where every piece of copy in the product is recorded alongside the legal and usability rationale behind it. From then on, reviews stopped being conversations about wording and became validations against a rationale already written down.
The technical terms that couldn’t be removed —TCEA, net sale, compensatory interest— were handled with explanations that appear at the exact moment the user is likely to wonder what they mean, not in a separate glossary.
Impact
- BBVA Peru’s first product with fully digital contracting and repayment, end to end
- Credit assessment based on POS sales history instead of traditional scoring, opening access to businesses the standard model left out
- Design approved by the Holding Design team as a scalable pattern, replicable across other markets in the group
- First version of the product co-created with the holding’s product leads, with Peru as the launch market
- The Content Deck became a shared source of truth for product, legal and marketing in the product’s later iterations
The Framework
What Anticipo POS left me with: in a new financial product, content isn’t the final layer of design — it’s the structure. A mechanism the user can’t recognize while using it isn’t a comprehension problem, it’s a regulatory risk. And when six areas have to approve every word, writing down why each piece of copy was chosen frees the team from defending it over and over.
