Twint integration

CONTEXT

Not a bank product. A shared platform, deployed as ours.

Twint AG is Switzerland’s leading payment platform, co owned by the country’s major banks including UBS, with over 6 million active users and nearly one billion transactions in 2025. It is not a bank product. Each bank deploys it as their own branded app, carrying their logo and UI, but built on Twint AG’s infrastructure.

UBS had negotiated broader customisation rights than most banks. A separate app per bank is the Swiss market standard, not a UBS choice. At the time, no Swiss bank had P2P integrated into their main banking app.

MY ROLE

Sole designer, two squads, four years

Sole product designer on UBS Twint from 2020. In earlier years, junior designers worked under my direction on execution and exploration; I led all stakeholder engagement, design decisions, and strategic direction. From 2023 I covered both UBS Twint and UBS Mobile Payments as the sole designer across both squads.

The environment had no shared design system, a development team in Hungary with little prior experience working with designers, and stakeholders who routinely made product decisions without design input. Getting design properly embedded in the delivery cycle took sustained effort over several years, including restructuring the collaboration model with the PM toward a more agile approach with fixed UX checkpoints.

Twint AG, as the external infrastructure provider, defined the core product direction. Our scope was adapting their product and brand to UBS’s regulated banking environment, within the limits of UBS’s negotiated customisation rights. The design work covered the full product surface: P2P flows, QR scanning, partner offers, notifications, alerts, confirmation screens, security flows, and onboarding.

THE PROBLEM

The existing app was already failing

By the time I was working on UBS Twint, the model was breaking down across several dimensions at once. The app ran on a completely different design system from the main UBS banking app. Components were missing. The design library had no coverage of key patterns. There was no structural consistency with UBS’s core product, and the gap was widening with every release. Without a shared foundation, every change required custom work: slower to build, harder to maintain, and increasingly painful to release. Development was not just slow. It was becoming structurally impossible.

Twint AG was losing patience

UBS’s customisations were creating bottlenecks for everyone, slowing UBS’s own release cycle and causing delays in Twint AG’s main releases. Twint AG’s response was to push all banks toward a single consolidated app, removing bank specific customisation entirely. UBS would no longer have a product of its own.

UBS’s response was the wrong answer

Design played no part in producing it. What arrived was an execution brief. The proposal combined the Twint AG login screen with UBS branding, packed the interior with promotional banners for services unrelated to payments, and built none of it on the UBS design system that had just been overhauled. Asked how it would be delivered on infrastructure already failing, no one could answer. The space had been filled; the user had not been considered. When UBS’s own business stakeholders reviewed it independently, they arrived at the same conclusion.

THE STRATEGIC CASE

Retire the app. Build Twint into the bank.

I had been developing an alternative proposal in parallel for some time. The hybrid brief was not what prompted it. It was simply the moment to put it on the table. When I saw what had been produced, I raised my concerns directly and presented my own direction. Both were dismissed by the squad. With no traction internally, I took it further.

I benchmarked how major banking markets had addressed the same structural problem. The pattern was consistent: P2P payments had been absorbed as a native feature of the main banking app. Leading banks internationally, including players in markets with high payment adoption and strong digital infrastructure, had chosen integration over a parallel product. Switzerland’s per bank separate app model was the outlier, not the standard.

The proposal I built was not to surface a single entry point. It was to retire the standalone UBS Twint app entirely and embed Twint as a native widget inside UBS Mobile Banking: all existing functions and services, from P2P transfers to QR payments to partner offers, available within the banking app itself. No separate download, no separate account, no parallel design system.

The login screen entry point was a deliberate addition to this, not the centrepiece. The primary Twint user group, broadly 18 to 25 year olds, used the app almost exclusively to send and receive money. Being required to authenticate into the full banking app to do that was disproportionate friction for a task that takes seconds in the standalone experience. A login screen entry point removed it entirely, mirroring the immediacy users already expected.

It also addressed a subtler but consistent finding. A portion of users were reluctant to hand over their phone to confirm a payment, not wanting to expose their balance or holdings. The login entry point, combined with the existing discreet mode, resolved this cleanly.

I produced draft designs across the full integration: widget placement within the home screen, login screen entry points, icon concepts, and key interaction flows. Alongside the benchmark research, this gave the head of design a concrete proposal to evaluate, not a theoretical position.

Bringing Twint into UBS Mobile Banking, from research to strategy.

THE DECISION

The hybrid was rejected. The foundation was rebuilt.

I brought the proposal to the senior head of mobile design. Rather than handing it over, we built the full management case together: she provided the organisational reach and sponsorship, I provided the research, the designs, and the rationale. The proposal went to management with her as champion.

With the direction confirmed at that level, we ran both qualitative sessions and a quantitative study with 70 participants, including wealth management clients with assets from CHF 10,000 to over 250,000, to validate the approach before any build commitment. The study tested five initial hypotheses; four were refuted. Speed, privacy, wealth level, and age all turned out not to be the real concerns, ease of use was, cited by 47% as the top expectation. The proposal scored 3.66 out of 5: 56% satisfied or very satisfied, with clear, addressable concerns behind the remainder. Modelled against fixes to those concerns, favourable opinion was projected to rise significantly further across every group, giving the business a validated case for continued investment, not just a one-time proposal.

Full integration was ultimately judged too large a step for the immediate roadmap. The backend changes were substantial and the investment case was not yet in place. But the hybrid proposal was rejected. What emerged instead was a middle path: retain a separate UBS Twint app, but rebuild it properly on the UBS design system, with reusable components and structural consistency with the main banking product, as a foundation for deeper integration later.

My original proposal for full integration was subsequently adopted by business stakeholders and presented internally as their own direction. What shipped first: a standalone UBS Twint app, rebuilt natively on the UBS design system, alongside P2P and QR payment features now available directly within UBS Mobile Banking. Deeper integration, including entry points explored during research, remains on the roadmap, dependent on work outside this project’s scope.

THE DESIGN WORK

Built on the UBS library, not alongside it

The central decision was to build everything on the UBS design library, not alongside it. The goal was not consistency for its own sake but eliminating the customisation debt that had made every release progressively harder. Components built once, to UBS standards, reusable across cycles. That was the structural discipline the product had never had.

Where the design system had no coverage of Twint specific patterns, we built it. The principle: no custom component without clear justification. Anything that could use an existing pattern did. That constraint required consistent enforcement through design reviews, particularly against a development team accustomed to resolving ambiguity without design input.

The brand mapping required a deliberate decision for each component: where Twint’s visual identity applied and where UBS’s took over. Twint retained its character where users expected it. The line was set intentionally rather than resolved screen by screen.

UBS’s authentication standards are significantly more robust than the standalone Twint experience. The rebuild made that the default for all flows, rather than something layered on top.

An extract of screens from the proposal presented to management, the concrete design direction that got the rebuild approved and shaped the version that shipped.

OUTCOMES

What the work changed

RECOGNITION

Promoted to Associate Director

The promotion did not come from delivery alone. It came from challenging a direction the business had already committed to, proving a better one with research rather than opinion, and turning that into measurable quality the business could build on. Together with the years of work behind it, that is what made the case to senior management. In 2023 I was promoted to Associate Director.