For a startup, entering a new territory isn’t just about geography; it’s a collision of culture and sector-specific habits. When a startup looks to scale globally, the first instinct is to hire local consultants and copy the market leader. But in my experience leading design at Uzum (Uzbekistan’s first tech unicorn) I’ve learned that ‘local standards’ are often just collective bad habits. If you want to scale, you must figure out which user behaviours are cultural and which are simply caused by broken technology.
The ‘total balance’ myth
When I joined Uzum Bank in 2023, the task was to redesign a flagship app for a market that was a ‘sea of sameness.’ Every top-10 fintech app looked identical: a massive ‘Total Balance’ widget, too many features competing for attention, and a rigid ‘Favourites’ list.
The local veterans were adamant: “Uzbek users need to see their total balance to feel in control.” Their argument was grounded in a practical reality: in a market with a volatile currency and historically low trust in plastic cards, users often distribute their funds across multiple accounts.
While some UK and European apps like Monzo or Revolut do offer an aggregate balance, the focus there is almost always on the account balance, and the card is often secondary or even hidden from the main screen.
This classic model doesn’t translate well to Uzbekistan. Here, users often juggle multiple cards with small balances because they don’t fully trust plastic. Furthermore, because of a deep-seated distrust in the local currency’s stability, people prefer to keep their actual savings in cash dollars. This leaves their bank cards with scattered, unpredictable balances across multiple accounts. The ‘Total Balance’ was designed to solve this specific fragmentation, helping users calculate if they had enough combined ‘digital’ cash for a single purchase. Because of this, the widget was considered a ‘sacred cow’ – we were told that removing it would alienate our 2 million users.
Why the data disagreed
We started with the conviction that the aggregate balance was harmful to the user experience. In the fintech world, there’s a dangerous tendency to follow ‘standard’ market research blindly, but we suspected this specific benchmark was creating a cognitive trap.
Instead of taking the experts’ word for granted, we ran our own tests. The data showed that 75% of users only had one card linked and no other accounts. For this majority, the ‘Total Balance’ wasn’t a summary – it was a privacy liability. The balance was so prominent, users felt forced to keep it hidden by default because of fear of being peeped at.
We ran an A/B test. Group A saw the traditional ‘total balance’ at the top. Group B saw individual card balances as the primary focus.
The results were a wake-up call. In Group A, 8 out of 10 users failed to notice they had insufficient funds on a specific card before attempting a transaction. They were simply ‘blinded’ by the big number at the top, assuming the total covered them. In Group B, almost everyone caught the error instantly. By trusting our intuition over ‘market standards’ and moving the balances lower, we didn’t just fix a logic error – we also solved an ergonomic issue for the large Android devices popular in the region.
The Reality Check: A ‘market standard’ is often just a ritual born from old technical limitations. Local behaviour is a habit shaped by experience. Experience, in turn, is shaped by love or by suffering – and by the attempt to find at least some kind of solution in an imperfect world. A designer’s task is to uncover the root cause. Everything that grows out of suffering can – and should – be changed. Following this conclusion, we stepped away from traditional patterns, removed low-value elements, and surfaced the most-used actions – transfers, mobile top-ups, and ‘My Home.’ We also added a clear toggle to return to the old layout – in the end, only 2% of users switched back. More importantly, this wasn’t just a temporary win; our user base grew from the initial 2 million to 3.7 million, an 85% increase, proving that challenging the industry dogma was the right move for long-term scale.
Competitor benchmarks are to learn, not to copy
When we looked at P2P transfers, we found the market was fragmented. To send money abroad, you had to find ‘Visa Direct’; to send locally, you used ‘Card Transfer.’ It was functionally identical but cognitively exhausting. By hiding the underlying complexity and letting the system determine the transfer type based on the recipient’s details, we removed the friction of choice, which led to a 12% increase in transaction volume, proving that simplicity directly drives bottom-line growth.
I looked at leaders like Revolut and Monzo. While Monzo follows a more traditional fintech interface, Revolut famously mimics the UI of a messenger – the most frequently used app category in the world. Both have their own versions of ‘Favourites’ and the easiest path for us would have been to copy those benchmarks directly. Instead of forcing users to manually manage a ‘Favourites’ section, we implemented an algorithm that tracked frequent recipients and surfaced them automatically in the transfer flow.
Within two months, users stopped manually saving ‘Favourites’ entirely. We deleted the section that was popular in other apps, and not a single person complained.
Building trust by removing fears
The biggest wins for a startup come from identifying users’ key tension points. In Uzbekistan, electricity is pay-as-you-go. If your balance hits zero, the lights go out instantly. This caused 40% of our customers to check the app daily just to manage the anxiety of a potential blackout.
The ‘traditional’ banking solution is a scheduled payment. But schedules don’t work when your AC usage fluctuates in 40-degree heat. We introduced a Threshold Trigger: the moment your balance hits £0.60, the app tops it up.
We didn’t just build a feature; we removed a daily fear. That is how you build a unicorn in a new market.
A practical framework for startups entering local fintech markets
You cannot simply copy-paste your existing product into a new fintech market. If you are taking a startup into a new local market, I usually suggest the following proven approach:
Become the Customer: Use the local services until you feel the same frustrations as the locals.
Audit the ‘As-Is’: Map every corner case. Do not leave blind spots in the current infrastructure.
Identify Rituals vs. Habits: If a behaviour stems from a technical limitation (like slow transaction updates), it’s a ritual ripe for disruption. If it stems from a deep cultural value (like family financial responsibility), design around it.
Test the Sacred Cows: Run small-scale A/B tests on the features everyone tells you ‘must stay.’
Use the progressive JPEG method: Start by working out the general logic and happy path. Make sure there are no errors and then move on to working out all the details and adding corner cases.
Ship the Core Value: Don’t launch a ‘Spaceship’ app. Launch the one thing that solves the local pain point better than the incumbents.
Quick tips for startups entering new markets
In conclusion, entering a new fintech market requires both caution and courage. Don’t take the competitor’s story as gospel – you don’t know the path they took or the mistakes they made. Trust your own experience but validate every hypothesis with your customers: watch behaviour closely, run small tests, and let user reactions guide your decisions. Look beyond fintech apps for successful patterns – perhaps the most important lesson we learned is to stop looking exclusively at other banking apps.
Product teams often get tunnel vision, obsessing over fintech benchmarks while ignoring the apps their customers use most. There is an enormous amount of ‘free’ innovation to be found in the world’s most popular non-financial apps. Many patterns – like the auto-saving of frequent contacts or the chronological history of a messenger – can be integrated into fintech almost instantly. These patterns often land better and faster than any niche banking feature because users are already accustomed to them.
And, at last, don’t be afraid to make mistakes — only those who do nothing avoid mistakes.
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