Tolu Ali - Product Designer

REPAY

People often lend money to friends and family without keeping proper records. I designed a platform that helps them document and track these loans.

My Role: Product Designer (MVP Team)

Not a bank or a loan app

Repay is a simple platform that helps people record, confirm, and track money exchanged between people who know and trust each other.

Turning Verbal Promises into Verified Records

Many people have experienced the challenges of informal lending. You lend money to somone you know without a written agreement because it feels unnecessary. Weeks or months later, details are forgotten, and the lack of records can create tension in the relationship.

Repay was created to solve this problem.

Designing for Clarity and Trust
Separating lenders and borrowers:
People can be both lenders and borrowers. To reduce confusion, I separated both roles using a toggle in Active Records.
Users can now switch, making each view easier to scan and understand.
Designing for Clarity and Trust
Designing safer actions:
The "Pay Now" button only appears in the Borrower view, preventing users from triggering the wrong action while reviewing records.
The interface presents different actions for each role.
Designing for Clarity and Trust
Building trust while protecting Privacy:
Before lending money, users need enough information to make a decision, without having access to personal information. I designed a card that gives users helpful signals without revealing sensitive details.
Designing for Clarity and Trust
Expanding Access for Verified Users:
Some users, such as financial institutions or law enforcement agencies, may need access to more detailed records for legitimate purposes. I created a separate access level that unlocks additional information only after verification processes.
In development for a future release.

The Core Product Pillars
Voluntary Verification:
No debt is officially published or recorded until the borrower explicitly confirms it, preventing the platform from being weaponized to make false claims.
The Core Product Pillars
Sustained Transparency:
To make reflection feel effortless,
Active debts are tracked in real time, disputes are logged, and settled agreements leave a permanent, clean record of financial integrity.

Designing Under Constraints
Overview:
We had less than four weeks to design and ship an MVP. The focus was speed, clarity, and decisions that could hold under real engineering constraints. Every flow was simplified to fit the timeline and avoid blocking development.
Designing Under Constraints
The debt Status change:
The "update status" flow went through two redesigns before approval. The first version had multiple steps which made it slow. The final version reduced it to two fields, phone number and email.

The Evolution of Repay
Repay is still growing. The MVP proved that people need a simple way to record debts and check credibility. The next phase focuses on making repayments easier, and expanding how the platform can be used.
The Evolution of Repay
In-app repayments: Users will be able to send and receive repayments directly within Repay. Support for secure payments on larger loans is also being explored.
The Evolution of Repay
Platform integrations: Other financial products will be able to use Repay's credibility data to support lending and credit decisions.
The Evolution of Repay
Clearer data transparency: Long and complex terms pages will be replaced with simple explanations that show users how their data is being used, directly from their settings page.

Not every loan needs a contract, but every loan needs a record.

Working on Repay showed me that many financial disagreements start before money becomes the issue, when people remember the same agreement differently.

By helping both parties record and track loans, Repay creates a shared source of truth. The goal is not only to track money but to protect the relationships behind it.

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