How Lotachi Anidi is designing trust in fragile financial systems

Lotachi Anidi is a Nigerian design entrepreneur building fintech products for global and emerging markets. With over six years of experience, she started as an early designer at Binance before becoming a founding designer at Nestcoin, a company backed by Coinbase. At Nestcoin, she led design for Onboard, a global banking app that evolved from a crypto wallet into a broader financial platform serving creators and builders across frontier markets. Beyond product design, Anidi is also the creator and host of Behind the Ship, an interview series spotlighting technology and design leaders from companies such as Paystack and Spotify. Born in Enugu, she studied electrical engineering before teaching herself product design and building platforms that expand access to financial and digital tools. In this interview with KENNETH ATHEKAME, she explained why fintech products often misunderstand how people actually manage money in volatile economies, and how stablecoin-powered systems are quietly reshaping global payments. Excerpts:

Fintech promises to simplify money. What do many products miss about how people in volatile, underbanked markets actually handle it?

A lot of fintech products assume money behaves predictably. Many simply mirror Silicon Valley models and ship one-size-fits-all solutions.

But in emerging markets, money rarely behaves predictably. People are constantly navigating inflation, currency swings, delayed payments, or limited access to global financial rails.

So they hedge. They hold value in multiple currencies, move money quickly, and often rely on informal systems. Good financial design needs to reflect that reality instead of designing only for ideal conditions.

Money carries emotional weight. How can designers reduce anxiety around financial decisions?

The biggest source of anxiety is uncertainty. People want to know: Did my money move? When will it arrive? What did it cost me?

Good financial interfaces reduce that uncertainty. Clear transaction states, transparent fees, and quick confirmations make a huge difference when the stakes are high.

You’ve designed products where financial infrastructure can fail. What does good design look like in that environment?

In those markets, good design is less about aesthetics and more about reliability.

You design for when things break- delayed payments, failed transactions, or network issues. The interface should help users understand what happened and what they can do next. If the system fails, the product shouldn’t leave the user confused.

Interfaces often hide complexity. When should designers show it instead?

If complexity affects the outcome, you shouldn’t hide it. Transparency builds trust. When users can see the FX rate, settlement time, or transaction fees clearly, they feel more confident about the process.

The key is progressive disclosure, simple by default, but transparent when users want to see the details.

Fintech is often framed around payments or lending. What deeper problem are financial interfaces solving?

Access. First-class access. Many people are locked out of the global financial system simply because of where they were born or the passport they hold. They face high fees, slow transfers, and limited access to modern financial tools.

Borderless financial interfaces can serve as bridges into that system.

In markets where institutions are distrusted, how can an interface convince users their money is safe?

Trust is built through signals. Clear receipts, reliable transaction histories, visible confirmations, predictable behavior from the app, and system status updates even during downtime.

When users consistently see evidence that their money moved correctly, trust builds over time.

What’s fundamentally different about designing payments for frontier markets?

You’re constantly designing around constraints.

Unstable internet, fragmented banking infrastructure, currency volatility, lower financial literacy, limited international payment access, and a higher presence of bad actors.

People also move between formal and informal systems, so the interface has to reflect that reality rather than assuming everything works like it does in developed markets.

Financial products shape behaviour. Where’s the ethical line between smart design and manipulation?

Financial products can nudge behaviour, but they shouldn’t trap users.

If a design decision benefits the company but harms the user long term, that’s manipulation.

Good financial design should make healthier financial choices easier—not exploit people’s habits. In many emerging markets, stablecoins are increasingly used as payment rails rather than speculative assets.

In places with unstable currencies, stablecoins offer stability rather than speculation. For many people, they provide access to financial services they previously couldn’t use.

They allow users to store value in dollars and move money globally without relying on slow or expensive banking systems.

How does designing a stablecoin-powered payment product differ from traditional banking rails?

You’re designing around a very different settlement model.

Transfers can be significantly faster, but users still need to understand concepts like custody, wallet addresses, and conversions between local currencies and stable assets.

The challenge is making that infrastructure feel simple without hiding important risks. During my time building Onboard, we spent years working through those design challenges.

Traditional financial institutions are beginning to integrate stablecoins and blockchain infrastructure. What’s your take?

It feels inevitable. Stablecoins solve real problems in global payments, particularly for cross-border transactions. What we’re seeing now is traditional finance gradually connecting to that infrastructure. The real design challenge is making these systems work together without exposing all the complexity to everyday users.