BFSI UX Takes Centre Stage as Institutions Shift Focus from Screens to Behaviour

As financial institutions accelerate digital transformation, a quieter shift is unfolding behind the screens, one that has less to do with visual design and more to do with how core product journeys are being rebuilt. Industry studies over the past few years have consistently shown high abandonment across onboarding, activation, and transaction flows, especially in complex financial journeys where decision load, documentation and compliance intersect.

As a result, banks, brokerages, insurers and fintech platforms are increasingly turning to specialised design and product consultancies to re-engineer the behavioural structure of their digital products, not just their interfaces.

Among the firms working in this space is Mumbai-based Them Consulting, which focuses on redesigning financial products from the inside out. Instead of concentrating on surface-level UI, Them works on Business Strategy, Value Proposition Modelling, Product Envisioning, Full-Stack UX Design, Funnel Optimisation, Growth Pods, Experience Mentorship and even more, helping organisations align user behaviour with business outcomes.

Their work spans onboarding and activation flows, investment and lending journeys, post-transaction workflows, and long-term engagement loops — with a focus on reducing friction, clarifying decision paths, and improving completion and retention rates.

Unlike traditional UX interventions that emphasise usability or visual refinement, Them applies a behaviour-led design lens, analysing where users hesitate, abandon, misunderstand, or mistrust a journey. This shifts the work from screen design to flow design, resulting in structural changes such as re-sequencing steps, simplifying disclosures, reducing cognitive overload, and creating progressive, context-aware decision paths.

“Most financial journeys don’t fail because the products are inadequate,” says Hitesh Agrawal, Founder & Managing Director of Them. “They fail because users encounter too many decisions without enough clarity. The work begins with reducing that cognitive load.”

This shift is being driven by rising competitive pressure from fintech platforms that have reset user expectations around speed, transparency and simplicity, particularly in India’s rapidly digitising Tier-2 and Tier-3 markets. As digital finance adoption widens, institutions are realising that growth is no longer constrained by access, but by comprehension.

AI-driven personalisation is expected to push this further, moving platforms away from static journeys towards intent-aware systems that adapt in real time. Designing such systems requires not just interface design, but research, behavioural modelling, data interpretation and architectural decision-making.

As India’s digital finance ecosystem matures, experience design is becoming an operational discipline rather than a cosmetic one. Product leaders are increasingly connecting user clarity to funnel efficiency, and funnel efficiency to core business metrics.

The result is a new definition of UX in BFSI, not as what users see, but as how smoothly, confidently and quickly they move. And increasingly, that invisible layer of experience is where growth is being engineered.