Remessa Online

Overview

Remessa Online was one of the most ambitious Brazilian fintech bets of the mid-2010s: a digital-native challenger taking on cross-border money transfers, a category that had been dominated for decades by traditional banks, with fees, exchange spreads and paperwork to match. The premise was simple to say and harder to deliver: make sending and receiving money across borders feel as obvious as sending a message.

I joined as Product Design Lead in 2016, shortly after the product's launch, and helped shape what cross-border payments could feel like for individuals, freelancers, students, expats and SMBs paying or being paid in another currency. For many of those users, an international transfer wasn't a transaction. It was a parent, a tuition, a survival. That framing followed every design decision we made. As the company scaled, the design surface scaled with it: from a single transfer flow into a multi-product platform with onboarding, KYC, business accounts, acquisition channels and a full brand system. I was later promoted to Head of Design, where the work shifted again: from drawing the next screen to deciding who would draw it, and what "good" should mean once the company outgrew any single person's standard.

In 2022, Remessa Online was acquired by EBANX for US$229M, one of the most significant fintech exits in cross-border payments in Latin America. Looking back, the most lasting part of the work wasn't any single screen or feature. It was the proof that design, embedded early enough and given room to scale, can reshape an entire category's relationship with its customers.

Challenges

• —Revolutionizing Cross-Border Payments: When I started, international money transfers were complex, expensive, and inaccessible to most people. My role was to transform the user experience, making it easy, intuitive, and affordable.
• —Simplifying Complexity: I led efforts to ensure that both individuals and businesses could use the platform effortlessly, focusing on simplifying the cross-border payment process.
• —Scaling the Design Team: As Remessa Online grew rapidly, my challenge was to scale the design team to match the company's growth. Over three years, I built a team of 12 designers from scratch.
• —Stakeholder Management: With the company's growth came more stakeholders and increased investor pressure. One of my key responsibilities was managing these relationships and aligning expectations.

Key Projects

• —Designing User Journeys for International Transfers: Led the design of user journeys for both individuals and businesses, focusing on making registration, transfers, and fund receipt as seamless as possible.
• —Conversion-Focused Acquisition Channels: Oversaw the creation and optimization of acquisition channels, including the main website.
• —User Journey Optimization: Optimizing critical user flows to improve onboarding and transaction processes, resulting in higher engagement and reduced churn.

Results & Impact

• —Built and scaled the design team from the ground up, growing it to 12 members in three years.
• —Led the implementation of a new brand system while optimizing key user journeys.
• —Registration Volume: Increased sign-ups through improved user flows.
• —Transaction Volume: Increased the number of remittances and overall transactional volume.
• —Conversion Funnel: Reduced drop-offs at key stages of the user journey.
• —LTV: Improved customer retention, contributing to long-term business value.

Learnings

• —Design as strategy: Design can directly drive business outcomes.
• —Balancing growth and quality: Scaling while maintaining quality required a clear hiring process and structured design operations.
• —Customer-centric solutions: Always view challenges from the customer's perspective.
• —Data-driven design: Tracking metrics like conversion and drop-offs informed design decisions.
• —Resilience under pressure: These experiences shaped my resilience and understanding of what sustainable leadership truly requires.