Case · 04 · Vlum · Payment gateway

Vlum: trust to pay and get paid.

Brand, identity, and a design system for a payment gateway that connects merchants and buyers — built to inspire the same trust as a bank.

Client
Proposal · Vlum
Role
Product · UX/UI · Branding
Stage
Ideation to proposal
Deliverables
Brand, design system, landing

01 · Overview

A gateway that acts as the intermediary between paying and getting paid.

Vlum is a payment gateway: the intermediary that lets you collect payments through multiple electronic methods. Like point-of-sale tools such as Clip or Mercado Pago, or the platforms behind Uber, online courses, and subscriptions that rely on a gateway to generate the purchase ticket and the deposit to the merchant.

Beyond moving money, a gateway validates fraud and laundering. This project stayed on the drawing board, but it gave me a deep understanding of how payment-intermediary processes work.

02 · Challenge

How do you earn trust without being a bank?

The biggest challenge was understanding the companies that already exist and, above all, their validation: the backing of their clients and users' trust to deposit — often in foreign currency, due to restrictions that sometimes exist.

Moving other people's money requires that people believe in the platform before they use it.

The call I made

The client asked for a gateway. There was no product, no users, no data — only an ambition to enter a market already held by Conekta, Stripe and OpenPay. In that situation the risk is designing a competitor's product with a different logo.

I decided to treat the whole engagement as a bet that had to be argued, not a brief to execute: state the assumption, find evidence for or against it, and only then design. What follows is that chain.

“

I don't associate payment gateways with payments, but I trust the product, so I take the risk.

Testimonial · Research
“

I don't know the processes between the payment and how my bank asks me to authorize the charge.

Testimonial · Research
“

Most of my payments are set up on autopay, and I didn't know payment gateways as an intermediary.

Testimonial · Research

03 · Process

Benchmark, personas, and brand building.

All the ideation, the benchmark, and the creation of brand and identity were made to present a solid proposal to the client, who wanted to understand the process and step into the world of payment gateways.

01

Assumption

People choose a gateway the way a business chooses a vendor.

The client's premise: win the merchant, and the buyer follows. Trust was framed as a B2B sales problem.

02

Evidence

Four competitors mapped, three profiles interviewed.

Benchmark of Conekta, Stripe, OpenPay and PayU across their customer journey, against conversations with a small-business CEO, a tech entrepreneur and a freelance consultant.

03

Insight

Buyers do not know the gateway exists — but they still judge it.

People described paying through an intermediary they could not name, and deciding to proceed based on whether the moment felt like their bank. The trust problem was on the buyer side, not the merchant side.

04

Opportunity

Inherit the credibility of banking without claiming to be a bank.

If people already map this moment onto their bank, the fastest route to trust is to speak that visual and verbal language deliberately — not to invent a new category.

05

Decision

Build the brand before the product.

I argued the first deliverable should be identity and design system, not screens. Without a credible surface, no flow we designed would get used — and the client needed something they could take to a board, not a prototype.

  1. Competitive benchmark

    Analysis of existing gateways —Conekta, Stripe, OpenPay, PayU— mapping their customer journey: search, first contact, information, service, and decision.

  2. User personas

    Three real market profiles: a small-business CEO, a tech entrepreneur, and a freelance consultant, each with their own payment motivations and frustrations.

  3. Customer journey

    Vlum's ideal journey against the pain points spotted in the competition.

  4. Brand & identity

    Naming, logo, palette, and voice: a brand that feels close to banking without being a bank.

  5. Landing & design system

    A complete design system and a landing that lands the value proposition.

Benchmark · Conekta customer journey Benchmark · Conekta
Benchmark · Stripe customer journey Benchmark · Stripe
Vlum ideal customer journey Customer journey · Vlum
User persona · Lucía Sánchez, small-business CEOSmall business
User persona · Roberto Ruíz, entrepreneurEntrepreneur
User persona · Carlos Grill, freelancerFreelance

04 · Solution

Banking colors, language of trust.

The solution was to lean on what people already associate with safety: banking colors, terminology that matches a bank's —even though Vlum isn't one— and graphics tied to finance. If people associate them with a bank, the brand had to speak that language.

Vlum brand identityBrand · Vlum
Vlum landingLanding · Hero
Vlum design system: colors, typography, componentsFull design system
Vlum payment-methods landingLanding · Payment methods
Decision · 01

Banking-associated colors

A palette people link to financial institutions, to inherit that perception of safety.

Decision · 02

Bank terminology

Language that matches banking, even though Vlum is a gateway and not a bank.

Decision · 03

Finance graphics

Iconography and illustration tied to financial themes to reinforce the context.

The tension in that choice.

What we gained

Instant credibility

Banking colours and terminology let a brand nobody had heard of read as safe on first contact — the single biggest barrier for a product that moves other people's money.

What we gave up

Distinctiveness

Looking like a bank means looking like the other gateways too. I accepted a less ownable identity because, at zero users, being trusted matters more than being remembered — and differentiation can be earned later, from a position of credibility.

05 · Outcome

A project that stayed on the drawing board, but left a lot behind.

4

Gateways analyzed

Benchmark of Conekta, Stripe, OpenPay, and PayU with their customer journey.

3

User personas

Small business, entrepreneur, and freelancer, with real motivations and frustrations.

0users

Never shipped

The proposal did not go to production, so nothing here is validated by real behaviour — only by research and argument.

What this case does and does not prove. Evidence comes from a competitive benchmark of four gateways and qualitative conversations with three market profiles. There are no adoption, conversion or revenue figures, because the product never reached production. What it demonstrates is how I make a decision when there is no data to lean on — and what I would have measured first had it shipped: whether buyers who could not name the gateway still completed the payment.

What I take away from this project

Curious about my work?

Let's chat. I'm always open to understanding a project better, no matter how challenging or complex it seems.

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