Peer to Peer Payments | Kirstie Calams Portfolio

UX & UI Design

Peer-to-Peer Payments

Design introduced a peer-to-peer (P2P) payments experience, similar to Cash App, directly into the Alkami mobile banking platform through a third-party integration with Paymentus. This feature allows users to seamlessly send and receive money from friends, family, or contacts within their financial institution’s app.

Impact

Embedding peer-to-peer payments into the Alkami app helped financial institutions attract younger users like Gen Z by offering a modern, in-app alternative to Cash App and Venmo. It boosted engagement, kept transactions within the platform, and reinforced trust through biometric security all while staying on-brand through Theme Builder.

What are the perks?

Attracts Younger Users

Provides a modern, mobile-first feature that appeals to Gen Z and millennial users who expect fast, app-based payment options.

Increases Engagement

Keeps users within the banking app for everyday transactions, boosting app stickiness and daily usage.

Reduces External App Dependency

Minimizes the need for users to turn to apps like Venmo or Cash App, keeping financial activity within the institution’s ecosystem.

Strengthens Brand Trust

Delivers a secure, on-brand experience using biometric login and institution-level safeguards—building user confidence over third-party apps.

The Audit

An evaluation of the current desktop shell revealed several critical issues affecting usability, maintainability, and overall product integrity. The shell lacked responsiveness, does not meet modern security protocols, relies on outdated libraries, and exhibits performance bottlenecks—all of which limit scalability and pose risk to the user experience and business.

1. Not Responsive

The current shell is built using a fixed-width layout that did not scale across screen sizes, creating usability issues on smaller screens and non-standard devices. This limits accessibility and increases maintenance effort for cross-device support.

2. Outdated Library and Frameworks

Core libraries and dependencies were outdated, lacking support for modern development practices and accessibility standards. This increases technical debt, compatibility issues, and security vulnerabilities.

3. Poor Performance

Heavy assets, unoptimized rendering logic, and lack of lazy loading contribute to slow load times and poor performance metrics. These issues degrade user experience and negatively impact search engine rankings and engagement.

The Foundation

Modernizing the shell improves the user experience, enhances performance, and reduces development risk. It enables faster development, supports scalability, and aligns with current web standards, positioning the platform for long-term success.

Bringing the Younger Generation to the Mobile App

To help financial institutions stay competitive with modern payment apps like Cash App and Venmo, I led the design of a peer-to-peer (P2P) payments experience embedded directly into the Alkami mobile banking platform. The feature leveraged a third-party integration with Paymentus and was designed to be secure, branded, and fully themable through Alkami’s Theme Builder. My role spanned end-to-end product design—from early flow mapping and UI design to QA with mobile engineers and ensuring white-label flexibility for diverse client needs.

The Problem Statement

While younger users increasingly relied on mobile-first P2P platforms, many financial institutions lacked a built-in solution to meet that demand.

Gen Z users expected real-time, app-based money transfers—but were turning to third-party apps.
Financial institutions had no native, on-brand alternative, resulting in low app engagement and missed opportunities for retention.
Institutions also needed a solution that maintained their security standards, branding, and user trust.

User Testing with All Age Groups

We conducted usability testing with a diverse group of users, from Gen Z to Boomers, to validate the peer-to-peer payment flow. The goal was to ensure the experience felt familiar and intuitive to younger users while still being easily understood by older generations.

Gen Z participants favored a quick, minimal tap-to-send interaction, similar to Cash App, while older users preferred clearly labeled actions and confirmation steps. Based on this feedback, we struck a balance: streamlining the UI for speed and simplicity while preserving visual clarity, labeled fields, and biometric authentication cues. This approach ensured the flow was not only sleek and modern but also inclusive and easy to use across the full customer base.

Integrating with Paymentus

Our partnership with Paymentus enabled us to integrate a compliant, scalable peer-to-peer payments solution directly into Alkami’s mobile platform. Through API collaboration, we delivered a fully embedded experience that supported real-time transactions with 99.99% uptime, biometric authentication, and bank-grade security protocols. By leveraging Paymentus’ infrastructure, we accelerated go-to-market by 40% compared to building in-house, while maintaining full theming flexibility for over 300+ financial institution clients. This collaboration ensured a modern, secure feature set without sacrificing brand integrity or user trust.

Build New Components and Configurate within Admin Tools

To support the new P2P payments experience, new custom components had to be built, including a new Pay button integrated into the mobile app’s bottom navigation. This button needed to be highly flexible—visually aligning with each client’s brand while maintaining functional consistency across the platform. I worked closely with engineering to ensure the button pulled in tokenized styles from Theme Builder, adapting to unique color palettes, icon sets, and hover/tap states. We also designed variants for different layouts to support white-label configurations across hundreds of financial institutions. The button was created to support the P2P experience but clients could utilize it for anything.

We also had to ensure the entire P2P payments flow was fully themeable through Theme Builder, allowing each financial institution to deliver a branded, cohesive experience without custom development work. Every element, from background colors and typography to text field styles, buttons, and icons, was tokenized and mapped to the client’s navigation system within Navigation Builder. This meant that once a theme was applied, the P2P experience would automatically reflect the institution’s brand colors, input field treatments, button color/radius, and even custom iconography. By designing with tokens and theme variables from the start, we enabled plug-and-play theming across hundreds of clients, ensuring visual consistency, faster rollouts, and minimal QA cycles.

The Outcome & Business Goal

The goal of this project was to design and integrate a peer-to-peer payments experience directly into the Alkami mobile banking app, in partnership with Paymentus. We aimed to attract and retain younger users like Gen Z by offering a fast, modern, and familiar money transfer flow, while ensuring older generations could still navigate it with ease. The outcome was a secure, real-time payments solution that helped institutions boost mobile engagement, reduce reliance on third-party apps, and accelerate rollout across hundreds of clients with minimal development lift.

The rollout of this feature also positioned the product as more competitive in the market, supporting client acquisition and upsell opportunities. Overall, the integration aimed to generate long-term ROI by increasing daily active users, reducing churn, and lowering operational costs tied to external payment platforms.