Billet

Billet is a digital financial ecosystem launched in the Dominican Republic in 2022, with the goal of onboarding the largely unbanked population into the formal financial system.

The first product in the ecosystem was a mobile-based digital wallet that enabled account creation using only a smartphone and a minimal initial balance. The strategy centered around rapid user adoption, followed by progressive expansion of financial offerings and gradual integration into traditional banking channels.

A digital ecosystem designed to make financial services accessible to a predominantly unbanked population.

CONTEXT

The Dominican Republic has historically been a cash-driven economy, with nearly 95% of its population outside the formal banking system. Traditional banking processes were highly bureaucratic, creating barriers to inclusion.

The solution was conceived as a multi-stage ecosystem:

Digital wallet onboarding: allowing users to open an account via mobile with a minimal initial deposit.
Merchant adoption: enabling small businesses to use the app as a mobile point-of-sale system.
Scaling to medium-sized enterprises: introducing administrative and backoffice management tools to support business-level operations.

KEY PROBLEM IDENTIFIED

End users (unbanked population)

Low-end devices and outdated operating systems.
Limited digital literacy, which made basic actions difficult—such as locating an address on a map or understanding differences between types of digital screens.
Incomplete identity data for banking validation, since it was common for individuals to only register their parents’ names, complicating KYC (Know Your Customer) processes.

Internal users (financial institutions and regulators)

Required complete and verifiable data to prevent fraud and comply with regulations.
Needed workflows that could integrate with the existing high banking bureaucracy, even for basic transactions.

CHALLENGE

The core challenge was finding the right balance between user simplicity and regulatory complexity. In fact, the launch was postponed for a full year because no legal framework existed for this kind of product at the time. Federal-level approval was required to allow Billet to operate.

What appeared to be a straightforward proposition — enabling account creation from a smartphone — evolved into a major challenge due to:

The digital and technological gap among users.
Limited digital literacy in the population.
Strict legal and compliance requirements to enable a secure financial ecosystem.

MY ROLE

My role expanded progressively throughout the project. I started as a contributing designer, working on user research, user stories, and flow design. As the initiative matured, I transitioned into a more strategic position, overseeing high-fidelity prototyping and stakeholder validation.

Ultimately, I became Design Lead, managing a distributed design team across multiple squads and ensuring delivery quality. This progression was formally acknowledged at Globant through a performance bonus after driving 125% profitability within the design team.

IMPACT

The platform became a financial inclusion milestone in the Dominican Republic, shifting a traditionally excluded segment into an accessible and trusted digital environment.

50,000+ active users during the first month post-launch
3.4k+ ratings on the Apple App Store
50,000+ downloads of “Billet Comercios” on Google Play