Simplifying Open Finance in Brazil

How we redesigned the user experience in a regulated space—driving clarity, trust, and higher conversion for Belvo.

Role

Senior Product Manager and Design Lead

Industry

Fintech

Belvo is the leading Open Finance platform in Latin America. They provide APIs that allow companies to access and interpret end-user financial data—from bank accounts and tax information to employment history. Our clients use this data to build better financial products, from lending and onboarding flows to budgeting tools and income verification.

In Brazil, the rollout of Open Finance created an entirely new regulatory and technical ecosystem—fast-moving, complex, and fragmented. While the regulation opened the door to innovation, it also introduced friction for users and integration challenges for financial institutions.

At Belvo, I led the product strategy and execution behind a major overhaul of the Open Finance user experience. This initiative focused on increasing conversion, reducing consent-related churn, and stabilizing a system that depended on dozens of external institutions. It required product leadership across design, engineering, compliance, and commercial teams—all while navigating a regulatory-first environment.

The Problem

Launching Open Finance in Brazil surfaced three key issues:

  • Overloaded user flows: Regulation required users to approve consent with detailed, often confusing, information up front. The default experience was long, technical, and hard to navigate.

  • Consent fatigue: Frequent manual consent renewals disrupted the user journey and reduced retention. Yet, Open Finance regulation demanded strict transparency around consent scope and duration.

  • Ecosystem instability: Our platform depended on third-party banks to deliver a consistent experience—but their infrastructure varied wildly, leading to inconsistent performance and broken sessions.

These pain points weren’t just UX issues. They created business risks: lower conversion, more support tickets, and poor product perception from clients trying to integrate with our API.

As a product manager, I saw this as an opportunity to redesign the experience with clarity, compliance, and scalability in mind.

The Solution: A User-Centered Redesign of Open Finance

To solve the friction and improve conversion, I led a product strategy focused on four key areas:

1. Simplifying the Consent Flow

Objective: Cut friction and cognitive load without compromising regulatory compliance. I led a complete redesign of the user flow, reducing it from 8 steps to just 4, focusing on clarity and hierarchy of information.

Key product decisions:

  • Streamlined copy and UX patterns to emphasize the value of the connection over regulatory jargon

  • Grouped technical and legal content in collapsible views to reduce noise

  • Redesigned mandatory redirection screens to visually match the native UI and reinforce continuity

Result: Drop-offs decreased, and users completed the flow faster, with fewer support inquiries.

Belvo is the leading Open Finance platform in Latin America. They provide APIs that allow companies to access and interpret end-user financial data—from bank accounts and tax information to employment history. Our clients use this data to build better financial products, from lending and onboarding flows to budgeting tools and income verification.

In Brazil, the rollout of Open Finance created an entirely new regulatory and technical ecosystem—fast-moving, complex, and fragmented. While the regulation opened the door to innovation, it also introduced friction for users and integration challenges for financial institutions.

At Belvo, I led the product strategy and execution behind a major overhaul of the Open Finance user experience. This initiative focused on increasing conversion, reducing consent-related churn, and stabilizing a system that depended on dozens of external institutions. It required product leadership across design, engineering, compliance, and commercial teams—all while navigating a regulatory-first environment.

The Problem

Launching Open Finance in Brazil surfaced three key issues:

  • Overloaded user flows: Regulation required users to approve consent with detailed, often confusing, information up front. The default experience was long, technical, and hard to navigate.

  • Consent fatigue: Frequent manual consent renewals disrupted the user journey and reduced retention. Yet, Open Finance regulation demanded strict transparency around consent scope and duration.

  • Ecosystem instability: Our platform depended on third-party banks to deliver a consistent experience—but their infrastructure varied wildly, leading to inconsistent performance and broken sessions.

These pain points weren’t just UX issues. They created business risks: lower conversion, more support tickets, and poor product perception from clients trying to integrate with our API.

As a product manager, I saw this as an opportunity to redesign the experience with clarity, compliance, and scalability in mind.

The Solution: A User-Centered Redesign of Open Finance

To solve the friction and improve conversion, I led a product strategy focused on four key areas:

1. Simplifying the Consent Flow

Objective: Cut friction and cognitive load without compromising regulatory compliance. I led a complete redesign of the user flow, reducing it from 8 steps to just 4, focusing on clarity and hierarchy of information.

Key product decisions:

  • Streamlined copy and UX patterns to emphasize the value of the connection over regulatory jargon

  • Grouped technical and legal content in collapsible views to reduce noise

  • Redesigned mandatory redirection screens to visually match the native UI and reinforce continuity

Result: Drop-offs decreased, and users completed the flow faster, with fewer support inquiries.

  1. Branding Customization

Objective:
Since clients are required by regulation to use the Belvo widget to connect bank accounts, it was essential to avoid compromising the end-user experience. To address this, we enabled visual customization of the widget, allowing clients to apply their own branding elements (colors, logo, and style). This makes the widget feel like a natural extension of their digital products and helps maintain a consistent user experience.

Result:
Our top clients quickly adopted this feature to deliver a smooth and continuous experience between their applications and the Belvo widget. This improvement became key to building user trust and increasing conversion rates when requesting access to financial information.

3. Smarter Consent and Renewal Options

Objective: Give users more control without sacrificing service continuity.

Through user interviews and feedback loops, we found that users didn’t want indefinite access—but also didn’t want to renew consents every 30 days. Based on this insight, I led the launch of a consent management portal and introduced an optional auto-renewal feature.

Product highlights:

  • Users could opt-in to automatic renewals while keeping the ability to revoke access at any time

  • Clear timelines and permissions displayed visually

  • The consent portal lived outside the widget, giving users long-term visibility and control over their connections

Result: 65% of users chose auto-renewal, significantly increasing retention without breaking compliance.

3. Real-Time Ecosystem Monitoring

Objective: Mitigate the effects of third-party infrastructure failures.

Because we couldn’t control banks’ uptime, we focused on transparency. I led the development of a status screen that surfaced availability and latency issues directly to end users.

Additional product decisions:

  • Real-time institution health indicators during flow

  • Contextual error messaging to reduce confusion

  • Client-side logs to speed up support resolution and technical debugging

Result: Support tickets related to failed connections dropped, and user trust in the system improved.

4. Iteration and Progressive Rollout

Objective: Validate changes in real-world environments before scaling.

We rolled out improvements incrementally:

  • Selected early-adopter clients with high volume

  • Set up A/B testing to track conversion across legacy and new flows

  • Detected and fixed an iOS redirection bug early on via rollback and retest

  • Monitored KPIs like drop-off rate, time to complete, and conversion rate in real time

Once metrics validated the success, we scaled the new experience across the full client base and communicated the improvements publicly.

Result: 45% CR and improved NPS across key clients.

My Role

As a Senior Product Manager with a background in Product Design, I owned the full lifecycle of this initiative—from problem framing and UX strategy to technical delivery and go-to-market rollout.

What I led:

  • Defined and prioritized product scope based on user feedback, compliance input, and technical feasibility

  • Coordinated cross-functional squads across engineering, legal, compliance, and customer success

  • Ran weekly QA and analytics reviews to iterate.

  • Maintained direct relationships with high-volume clients to validate hypotheses and monitor rollout results

This was a deeply collaborative and technically nuanced effort. My leadership ensured that we moved fast without breaking compliance—and that we shipped an experience users actually wanted to use.

Results

  • Conversion rate stable in 45%

  • 65% of users opted for automatic consent renewal

  • Consent fatigue and support issues were significantly reduced

  • Time to conversion was cut by over half

  • NPS from clients improved, thanks to clearer UX and reduced operational overhead

Final Thoughts

This project was more than a UI update. It was a full-stack product initiative that redefined how Open Finance in Brazil could work for users, clients, and regulators alike.

The takeaway? In regulated industries, product leadership isn’t just about compliance—it’s about clarity, trust, and execution. At Belvo, we turned a rigid, friction-heavy experience into a scalable growth driver by listening to users, simplifying where it mattered, and building with precision.

My Role

As a Senior Product Manager with a background in Product Design, I owned the full lifecycle of this initiative—from problem framing and UX strategy to technical delivery and go-to-market rollout.

What I led:

  • Defined and prioritized product scope based on user feedback, compliance input, and technical feasibility

  • Coordinated cross-functional squads across engineering, legal, compliance, and customer success

  • Ran weekly QA and analytics reviews to iterate.

  • Maintained direct relationships with high-volume clients to validate hypotheses and monitor rollout results

This was a deeply collaborative and technically nuanced effort. My leadership ensured that we moved fast without breaking compliance—and that we shipped an experience users actually wanted to use.

Results

  • Conversion rate stable in 45%

  • 65% of users opted for automatic consent renewal

  • Consent fatigue and support issues were significantly reduced

  • Time to conversion was cut by over half

  • NPS from clients improved, thanks to clearer UX and reduced operational overhead

Final Thoughts

This project was more than a UI update. It was a full-stack product initiative that redefined how Open Finance in Brazil could work for users, clients, and regulators alike.

The takeaway? In regulated industries, product leadership isn’t just about compliance—it’s about clarity, trust, and execution. At Belvo, we turned a rigid, friction-heavy experience into a scalable growth driver by listening to users, simplifying where it mattered, and building with precision.

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Less noise, more impact ✨ Rom Garcia 2025

Less noise, more impact ✨ Rom Garcia 2025

Less noise, more impact ✨ Rom Garcia 2025