Industry
FinTech
Company
Greenlight Financial
Year
2021 to 2024
My Role
Lead Designer
Greenlight Credit
The Project
Greenlight's first-ever credit product was built from scratch to help parents give teens a safe, supervised introduction to credit. I led end-to-end design across the whole arc of the project: early ideation, banking partner pitches, compliance reviews, interaction design, and launch. I worked directly with a PM, company leadership, and our partner bank, FNBO.
The Setup
Leadership wanted to enter the credit literacy space with a clear mission: help families understand and build credit together, safely. There was no existing product to build on. This was a full 0 to 1. I joined as lead designer from day one, which meant I was in the room for strategic conversations with leadership and our external banking partner, FNBO, before a single screen was sketched.
The Challenge
Early in the project, I noticed a tension we needed to address. The product was designed for parents with limited credit history who wanted to help their teens start building credit safely. But the card required parents to already have established credit and meet minimum credit limits, which meant the families who needed it most could not actually qualify.
The users who could qualify were more financially established parents who already understood credit well. For them, the draw was safety and oversight, not education.
I brought this directly to leadership and our PM. It was the hardest conversation of the project because it meant reframing what the product was actually for and who it actually served.
That reframe shaped everything that came after.
Design decisions driven by this insight:
Shifted the primary value proposition from "credit literacy" to "safe, supervised credit for teens"
Deprioritized gamified coaching flows as the hero experience and moved them to supporting content
Leaned into trust, transparency, and parental control as the core design language
Designed for a financially confident parent who wanted structured oversight, not a credit education
