Janus: End-to-End Digital Mortgage in Peru

Context

Interbank set out to become the first bank in Peru to offer a fully digital, end-to-end mortgage product — from simulation to disbursement — without a single in-person interaction. This placed Interbank at the frontier of regulated fintech in Latin America, where complex legal frameworks, risk evaluation models and multi-stakeholder workflows had historically made full digitization impractical. The product, codenamed Janus, needed to make the most regulated, document-heavy financial transaction in a consumer's life feel simple, transparent and trustworthy on a screen.

The Challenge

The core problem wasn't the interface — it was the language. Financial and legal terminology was creating cognitive friction at every step, causing users to abandon the flow before committing. Research confirmed what the data suggested: users weren't leaving because the process was too long. They were leaving because they didn't understand what they were agreeing to. The critical friction point was that users couldn't see their estimated monthly installment before entering personal data — a trust barrier that blocked early engagement. Dense financial terminology, including government programs like Mi Vivienda, added an additional layer of confusion. Meanwhile, the back-office workflow for risk and legal teams was entirely manual, creating processing delays that directly impacted time-to-disbursement.

My Role

I led product design across three phases as the primary UX designer, embedded with product management, risk, legal and the content design consultant. I defined the UX strategy and information architecture for the full simulation-to-disbursement flow. I translated the risk team's complex data requirements into a dynamic, progressive-disclosure form — replacing a static multi-page paper document with an adaptive digital experience. I designed the back-office tooling for risk evaluators, legal reviewers and commercial executives, mapping all role interactions through service blueprints and user flow diagrams. I ran guerrilla testing with internal stakeholders and conducted in-depth user interviews to iterate the flow. I also coordinated the content design strategy with an external consultant to systematically address the terminology problem across the entire product.

Strategic Approach

The strategic decision that changed the product was reframing the simulation step. I redesigned it as a discovery tool that showed users a range of options o they could choose the one that best suited them. This required negotiating with the risk team to expose partial simulation results earlier in the flow — a technically non-trivial change that meant aligning product, engineering and risk around a shared user insight. For the information architecture, I applied a progressive disclosure model: each screen contained exactly the information needed at that moment, with contextual support introduced precisely when cognitive load peaked. The form was rebuilt as an adaptive flow — questions dynamically appeared or disappeared based on prior answers, eliminating irrelevant fields entirely. For the back-office layer, I mapped the full multi-role workflow across a service blueprint before designing any interface, ensuring the tool reflected how risk, legal and commercial teams actually collaborated — not how the org chart said they should.

Impact

• 4-step simulation flow — down from a multi-screen process with no early feedback loop
• First sales within days of going to production, validating the conversion hypothesis
• First fully digital, end-to-end regulated mortgage product in Peru
• Multi-role back office aligned risk, legal and commercial workflows in a single system
• Established a replicable framework for regulated financial product design: progressive disclosure under constraint, adaptive forms, and multi-role service design