Paynova FinTech

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Principal Product Designer

Paynova is a Swedish payment provider and creditor with 20+ years of experience, delivering end-to-end B2B2C BNPL solutions.

My Journey at Paynova

Driving Paynova’s Design Mission

As the first in-house Product Designer, I joined Paynova to take over from the previous designer at the end of her consultancy assignment. My mission was to lead product design, establish a design culture within the organization, and lay the foundation for a growing design team.

Designing for Scalability

I joined Paynova as the focus shifted from MVP and product-market fit to growth, optimization, and internationalization into new markets. As Principal Product Designer, I contributed to enhancing the MyPages user experience, expanding the design system, and developing internal tools with scalability in mind.

Pivot & Handover

After a year at Paynova, a major pivot within the company shifted our efforts toward developing a new BNPL SaaS platform, which led to the creation of Sileon, a spin-off backed by Visa. As the design team grew, and after a period of splitting my responsibilities, I handed over my Paynova duties to focus entirely on Sileon.

Paynova MyPages

BNPL Post-Purchase Experience

Serving brands such as SJ, Tradera, and OKQ8, Paynova MyPages is a self-service web portal supporting the customer’s post-purchase journey, offered under the Paynova brand or as a white-label solution in a B2B2C model.

Optimized for desktop and mobile, it lets end-consumers view, manage, and pay for their purchases and invoices, providing a user-friendly overview of transactions, payment history, and outstanding balances, and enabling them to schedule or split payments as needed.

From Launch to Scale-Up: Designing MyPages for Growth

I came on board at Paynova shortly after the release of the first version of MyPages in Sweden. As Principal Product Designer, I progressively took ownership of the design process and strategy, working closely with the Head of Product and Lead Front-End Engineer.

During the first two quarters, we focused on consolidating MyPages and onboarding new merchants and creditors, while also laying the groundwork and design strategy for expanding our services into new markets.

Continuous iteration and optimization

As large merchants began offering Paynova as a BNPL provider, the user base grew rapidly — and with it, the number of detected issues increased significantly.

This pushed us to iterate quickly to address the challenges we uncovered. The larger user base also provided considerably more data, enabling us to define key metrics to track and inform our design decisions.

As the user base grew, so did the number of customer support tickets, which forced us to shift our focus toward reducing the workload for the CS team. To help identify pain points and track progress, we began holding biweekly meetings with customer support.

Driving Business Impact Through Cross-Team Collaboration

By collaborating regularly with customer support, we improved communication across channels and introduced new features and enhancements, addressing key pain points and elevating the overall user experience.

As a result, we anticipated a significant reduction in support tickets while continuing to grow our user base, which helped reduce the strain on the customer support team and allowed us to focus on adding the most value for users.

We used Hotjar and Google Analytics to collect user feedback and track our progress on MyPages. This graph shows a reduction of more than 50% in monthly comments over five quarters for a specific merchant, while user traffic continued to grow.

Internal Tools

Enhancing Internal Tools with Paynova’s Design System

Most products and applications under Paynova’s brand are supported by their own design system, independent of Sileon’s. Initially designed to enhance the end-user experience for Paynova customers, I later expanded its capabilities to accommodate the needs of various internal tools, improving operations and employee experience. The following projects, where I also served as Interim Product Manager during my first year at Paynova, demonstrate the versatile applications of Paynova’s design system.

CS Back-office

CS Back-office is designed to provide a 360º view of the end-customer on a single page, along with all the essential features to ensure smooth Customer Support operations. One of its key advantages is its similarity to MyPages, offering CS agents a more accurate view of the customer experience. Conceived as a replacement for an outdated system—incompatible with Paynova’s new core systems—it is the result of a collaborative effort between Product and Customer Support.

Consumer Config

Onboarding a new creditor to our white-label solutions involved various configurations and customizations to ensure a fully tailored user journey. Previously, these configurations were done manually across multiple systems, often requiring developer intervention. To streamline the process, we developed an all-in-one onboarding application with a user-friendly design, making it quick and accessible without the need for technical expertise.

Billy Config

Paynova’s core system includes a powerful configuration tool that offers high customization for BNPL product creation, supporting a wide range of use cases. However, like other internal tools, the process of creating and configuring these products was tedious, requiring specialized intervention. This process was completely re-designed in close collaboration with all relevant stakeholders, transforming a complex tool primarily operated via JSON files into a user-friendly and fully functional application. This extensive design work laid the foundation for the UI of Sileon’s new BNPL SaaS platform.

PRisk Admin

As part of Paynova’s core system, a dedicated tool is used to configure the various settings involved in the risk assessment process for BNPL customers. This configuration tool was revamped using Paynova’s design system, leading to a significant improvement in the user experience.

Case Study

Sileon BNPL SaaS

This case study explores my journey as Sileon’s founding product designer, covering the end-to-end process of developing a cloud-based SaaS platform (MVP), from inception to launch.
Continue to Case Study