Pryme, Taking Card Issuance from 3–7 Days to Under 3 Minutes

The Problem

Getting a debit card in markets like Nigeria, Ghana, or Kenya wasn't a digital problem, it was a structural one. Legacy bank infrastructure required customers to visit a branch, complete paper forms, and wait three to seven days for fulfilment. For a significant share of account holders, that friction meant never getting a card at all.

The business case was clear: remove the offline dependency and you unlock a dormant user base, cut branch congestion, and grow card-linked transaction volume. What wasn't obvious was how to do it inside the real constraints: multiple card scheme APIs (Mastercard, Visa, Verve, AFRIGO), varying KYC requirements across five markets, and a user base for whom this would often be their first fully digital banking interaction. That last constraint shaped everything.

My Role

I came in as the only designer. No handoff, no existing research, no component library. My first job wasn't to design, it was to define what we were actually building. I worked directly with one PM and three engineers: six weeks of design that got us through POC at our first partner bank, GTBank, and 21 weeks total to launch in a live branch.

Three early decisions shaped everything that followed.

1. 01Progressive disclosure keeps the regulated flow understandable without hiding its remaining steps.
2. 02Large touch targets and a dedicated keypad support standing use on fixed branch hardware.

I also built the front end for the card request-and-processing flow myself before handing it to engineering. On a regulated card flow, that mattered: it killed a whole category of handoff misreads, took time out of engineering's build, and meant the interaction I'd tested was the exact interaction that shipped.

Research & Discovery

At first the problem looked like straightforward digitisation: let customers request a card without visiting a branch. Discovery showed it was more structural. Card issuance sat across branch operations, KYC, scheme integrations, market-specific rules, and user trust, and designing a clean digital form on top of a broken offline process would have solved nothing.

I combined user and stakeholder discovery to understand both the customer journey and the backstage service model: interviews with cardless and abandoned-request users, conversations across branch, compliance, product and engineering, and service blueprinting to find the operational failure points. Five insights changed the product.

• 01The barrier was access, not demand. Users wanted cards; branch visits, paperwork, queues, and unclear timelines made getting one feel too costly. The opportunity wasn't to digitise the request, it was to remove the offline dependency.
• 02KYC was the biggest hidden blocker. Users often didn't know whether their account was even eligible until late in the process, which produced confusion and failed requests. Eligibility had to surface upfront, before users committed.
• 03Trust mattered as much as speed. Requesting a card this way was a high-trust banking action. Fees, identity requirements, collection, activation, and PIN setup had to be explained in plain language.
• 04Scheme and market complexity had to stay backstage. Users cared about practical outcomes: where the card works, what it costs, how fast they get it, not which scheme sat behind it.
• 05Instant issuance changed the rollout strategy. Cards could be printed instantly at the machine. That shifted the MVP away from delivery and toward instant issuance first; delivery introduced operational complexity (addresses, couriers, tracking, failed delivery) we could defer.

From Platform to Infrastructure, the Case for V2

After launch, I pushed for something that wasn't in scope.

The CVM had one job: issue cards. But the same hardware was already installed in branches across five countries, already trusted by customers, already integrated into bank systems. The banks had paid for the machine and the integration, adding service capabilities on top had marginal cost relative to the ROI of deflecting in-branch service volume.

I brought that argument to leadership: a machine that could handle account opening, funds transfer, card hotlisting, and complaint logging didn't just issue cards, it replaced the entire category of routine in-branch requests that consumed customer-service-officer time. The argument landed.

1. 01One action per tile keeps a broad service set scannable for customers with different levels of digital confidence.
2. 02The shared component foundation allowed new banking services to expand without creating a second design system.

Results

Within 6 to 12 months of launch:

<3 min

15M+

80%+

5

The v1 design system was adopted by two other product teams as the foundation for their own builds. At launch, Pryme trended on Twitter in Nigeria as customers shared the experience of walking out of a branch with a card in minutes.

That latent-value reframing changed how the business talked about Pryme internally, and it's what made the investment case for v2 straightforward.

Reflection

The most valuable lesson from Pryme was that the original use case wasn't necessarily the final product. We began by solving card issuance. Once the platform was in branches, it became clear that the same infrastructure could support a much broader set of routine banking interactions.

That changed how I thought about the product: not as a card machine, but as an extensible service point inside the branch.