Xerpay

Overview

Xerpay was a Brazilian fintech with a deceptively simple proposition: let employees access the salary they had already earned, before payday, without falling into the cycle of payroll loans, overdrafts and high-interest credit that defined the alternatives. By the time I joined as Product Design Lead, the product was operating inside 45 companies in Brazil (Ambev, RiHappy and Nivea among them) and reaching more than 60,000 employees. The startup was backed by Kaszek, Redpoint Ventures, QED and Vostok.

The design challenge sat at an unusually emotional intersection of money, work and dignity. The user wasn't a generic "employee". They were a person making a private financial decision in front of their employer's logo. We had to take a service that touched some of the most private moments in someone's financial life and make it feel empathetic, transparent and effortless to use. My role was to prepare the design organization for that kind of responsibility at scale: shifting from delivery-led work to a discovery-led, data-driven practice, and tightening the loop between product, brand, acquisition and engineering so the team could ship faster without losing the human texture of the product.

In 2021, Xerpay was acquired by Betterfly, a Chilean insurtech building Latin America's first social impact unicorn. The acquisition was a recognition of what the company had built, and the start of a new chapter for me personally, as the role evolved into a global one inside the parent organization.

Key Responsibilities

I prepared the design team for scaling, aligning design to maximize business results. My focus was on data-driven UX decisions, implementing discovery methodologies, and adapting workflows to agile processes. I also integrated acquisition and product design for a cohesive, user-centered approach across the product lifecycle.

Process

Using a blend of existing frameworks, we aligned solutions across business, product, design, and tech by gathering insights from data, user needs, OKRs, and stakeholders. Through an Atomic Research Structure and an Opportunity Solution Tree, we organized and prioritized opportunities, keeping the team aligned.

Key Projects

• —Refactoring and simplifying the app through progressive value-driven deliveries
• —Launch of a new website and rebranding
• —New withdrawal journey via PIX
• —KYC Journey
• —Payment scheduling
• —Fast track for user testing

Achievements

The testing process, which previously took over a month, was reduced to less than a week. This included standardizing documentation, automating workflows with finance and legal, creating a recruitment pool of testers, and upgrading the stack to Figma and Maze for async tests with automatic result collection.

Metrics impacted: Increase in the volume of registrations · Growth in withdrawals and transactional volume · Increase in recurrence and Monthly Active Users (MAU).

Learnings

The acquisition of Xerpay by Betterfly was an important lesson, highlighting how startups must quickly adapt to M&A scenarios, especially in integrating cultures.