Dufaa, a bank's answer to the digital lenders

Not a feature, a company

Bank Albilad already let people apply for financing the traditional way. Documents, proof of income, interviews, a branch.

Dufaa was not that. The bank set it up as a wholly owned finance company with its own license from the Saudi Central Bank, its own brand, and one way in: the app. Financing from 10,000 up to 500,000 SAR, repaid over as much as 60 months, applied for entirely on a phone.

That changes the design problem. A product with no branch behind it has to carry the whole relationship in the interface. If someone gets confused halfway through, there is no one to walk them through it. And Dufaa was launching into a market where digital lenders already existed and had already set the bar for how fast this should feel.

The competition was not the bank's old process. It was every app that already did this well.

So the brief was never "put the loan journey on a phone." It was to take a regulated eight-step financing application and make it clear enough that someone finishes it alone, the first time.

Language comes before anything else, and Bank Albilad's name sits on the splash. A new lender has to borrow trust before it has any of its own.

The part nobody understands

Dufaa's products are Shariah compliant, so this is not a loan. Dufaa buys a commodity, sells it to the customer, and the customer repays in installments. Partway through the application the customer has to choose whether Dufaa sells that commodity on their behalf or delivers it to them.

Necessary, and completely opaque if you have never seen it before.

We made three calls here:

• The product is a finance, never a loan. That word runs through every screen, every notification, every document name.
• The commodity step is explained before it arrives, not at the moment of choosing. The contract step comes first, and help sits on the screen itself rather than in a FAQ somewhere else.
• The choice is two plain sentences, written the way a person would say them, not the way the contract says them.

The hardest screens in a regulated product are the ones the regulation forces you to show. You cannot remove them. You can only decide whether someone understands what they just agreed to.

The commodity sale is explained on the offer screen, one step before the choice arrives, then the choice itself is two plain sentences. While it processes, the home screen says so rather than going quiet.

An application you can walk away from

Eight steps sounds like one sitting. It is not.

Parts of the application wait on things outside the app. Salary verification against government sources. A salary certificate reviewed by bank staff. A callback the customer has to answer. A promissory note signed through a separate national service. Days can pass between two steps.

So the app had to be good at being left and returned to. We designed the waiting, not just the doing.

• A progress screen that shows every step, what is done, what it is waiting on, and the date it happened.
• Save and exit on every step, treated as a normal thing to do rather than a way out.
• Percentage complete on the header, so the first thing you see on returning is how close you are.
• A calculator on the home screen, before any application, so someone can see what they might qualify for without committing to anything.

People do not abandon long applications because they are long. They abandon them because they cannot tell how much is left.

The calculator mattered more than it looks. It let someone answer their real question, how much can I get, without handing over anything first. By the time they started the application, they already knew roughly where it was going.

The calculator lives on the home screen, before any application. People can answer how much can I get without handing anything over first.

A tower instead of a table

Once a finance is active, the details page has a lot to say. Total amount, profit rate, total repayable, fees, tenure, monthly payment, first and last installment, virtual IBAN, documents, early settlement.

All of it is needed. None of it answers the question people actually open the app to ask, which is where am I.

So we put a tower at the top. It fills slice by slice as installments are paid, and a glance tells you how far along you are. The numbers move below the fold where people can find them when they want them.

The tower also carries state. It turns red when a payment is overdue. It finishes with a green flag when the last installment clears.

This was the one place we let the product carry some personality. A financing app earns nothing by being playful in the application flow, where people are nervous and the stakes are real. After the money is disbursed the relationship changes, and the product can afford a little warmth.

The tower fills as installments clear, so a glance answers where am I. It carries the state on its own: active, completed on the final payment, overdue when one is missed.

Riyadh

The first two directions we showed were too expressive. The client wanted restraint. White, calm, obviously trustworthy, closer to the lenders already in the market than to anything with a point of view. We had misjudged how much expression a new lender can carry before it stops reading as safe.

I went back with a colleague and worked on a third direction. Before I could finish it, our CEO called and told me to get on a plane.

I spent the next few days working out of the bank's office in Riyadh, next to the Dufaa team and their external consultants. I did not save the concept for the executive presentation. I took it around the building first, one team at a time. Marketing, then the senior consultants, then our own tech team, then legal, finance, and the Shariah team. Each of them had a reason the design might not survive, and each of those reasons was easier to fix in a room with four people than in a room with the board.

By the time I had the last two hours with the CEO, CTO, CFO and the rest of the executives, most of the objections were already answered, and most of the room had already seen the work and had their fingerprints on it. They pushed on details. The direction held.

In a bank, the executive meeting is where a design gets killed. I made sure it was not the first time anyone had seen it.

At the end, the CEO said something I still remember. That people usually say you get one chance to make an impression, and that I had used a second one to leave an excellent one.

That trip settled something that had been building since the start. We were already working as the team the client brought problems to rather than the vendor that produced screens, and Riyadh put it beyond question. When the engagement later narrowed, they kept the design team on through delivery.

Where it stands

Dufaa is live on the App Store and Google Play, licensed by the Saudi Central Bank and operating as Bank Albilad's digital financing arm.

The app was built in Arabic and English on the same bilingual system architecture we had built for Neo, adapted to Dufaa's brand and extended with the components this product needed. Reusing the architecture is most of the reason two designers could ship a product this size. One designer worked alongside me from start to finish and carried most of the interface; I led the concept, the client relationship, and the screens that were hardest to get right. I cover how that system works in a separate case study.

Version one launched on top-up financing, but the flows, the states and the components were built for the products behind it, car and housing finance among them, so the second product does not mean starting again.

We did not make the bank's process shorter. Regulation decides how many steps there are. We made every one of them something a person could understand, leave, come back to, and finish.