They handed me the bank's entire lending business

TL;DR

BCR is the largest bank in Romania, with more than 3 million customers. Today 87% of its retail lending goes out through the kind of digital products I worked on.

I designed on three surfaces at once. The customer's loan in the George app, the employee's screen in the back office, and the public loan simulator.

That number is the bank's, not mine. I quote it so you know what one broken step on one of these screens costs.

How I got the job

I had an engineering degree, four years designing microcontrollers, and no paid product design role behind me. BCR posted a senior opening and I applied anyway.

In the interview I said I was aiming for junior. They were aiming for senior, and we met in the middle at Mid UX/UI Designer.

Then they handed me the entire lending surface.

What I was working inside, and what was mine

The constraints. Lending is regulated, so specific numbers, warnings, and legal text appear in a fixed form. I could not remove any of it, only decide what a person notices first. I followed Erste Group's design system, because a 3 million customer product needs one flow to teach you the next.

Mine. Every screen and both flows of the simulator, the internal loan tool redesign, every design decision on the George app lending updates, and the CTA box nobody asked for. The four lending products were already live and earning when I arrived.

Theirs, and what I never got. The Product Owner set priority, a researcher owned research, developers built everything, legal decided what had to be on screen. No analytics after launch, so I cannot tell you a conversion lift and I will not invent one.

I went to every research session

The team had a researcher and I went anyway. I did not want problems filtered through somebody else's summary of them.

I built the prototypes, so sessions ran on the real flow with the real copy. I took my own notes in the room instead of reading a transcript later.

A researcher tells you what went wrong. A designer who watched it happen knows why and can draw the fix that afternoon.

The George app lending products

Campaign pricing. I put the original and discounted price on screen together, so the reduction is something you see rather than something you are told.

Extra income types. I extended the flow to accept income that is not a standard salary, like intellectual property, without lengthening the common path.

Error states. Every error now names what happened and what to do next. In a loan application a stop is usually permanent.

Here is a short and visual case study about it: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1U22vv5xp8rYpn17yat5QJIi7-aoywqhk/view?usp=sharing

A long tail of smaller work across all four products. Flow adjustments, copy fixes, and field changes as requirements shifted, every one of them inside banking rules. Nobody writes a case study about work like this, and it is what a bank actually pays a designer to do every week.

Three people read the same loan

The customer needs to know what they pay each month, in words they never had to learn. The front office employee needs to pass it on complete.

The back office employee judges it against the full financial picture, the bureau response, and a colleague's notes.

One rule kept all three aligned. The same fact appears in the same place with the same name on every screen it appears on.

The simulator, flow one

A public calculator with no account needed. You say how much and for how long, and it tells you what you would pay.

The logic already worked. The design sat on the bank's old system while the rest of the product had moved on.

I rebuilt it on the current system with the monthly number arriving first and the schedule underneath. A calculator that looks five years old says how much care went into everything behind it.

The simulator, flow two

People do not want an estimate, because an estimate is a guess with the bank's name on it. They want the number they will actually pay.

The flow queries ANAF, the national tax authority holding the official income record, and the credit bureau holding the borrowing history. It returns the number a real customer would get.

The hard part is not the form. It is asking a stranger on a public page for data they would normally hand over inside a branch.

The box nobody asked for

The advanced flow used to end with the person convinced, holding their real number, and being told to go to the app and start over.

I put a CTA box at the top of the flow, first thing you see, repeated at the end. The one at the top is the one that matters.

Five minutes in the simulator end nowhere. The same five minutes in the app return the same number, commit them to nothing until the final screen, and finish.

I drew that box in 2022. It is 2026 and it is still on the page.

Where it stands

I drew that box in 2022. It is 2026 and it is still on the page at george.bcr.ro/simulare-credit.

Banks redesign what underperforms and leave alone what works. Four years without a redesign call, on a public page at the country's largest bank, is the signal.

My manager once forwarded me a screenshot of the Product Owner saying she preferred working with me over the designer before me. I had five months of experience and he had years.

What this means for your team

I get handed a regulated product with rules I cannot change, and I still find where the money is leaking. Then I fix the leak without breaking the rules.

I sit in the research room rather than reading the summary, so a finding becomes a design the same afternoon. Nobody waits on a handoff between the two.

Four years later, the work I was never asked to do is still running on the country's largest bank. Give me your product and I will tell you where I would start.

That was five months in. I have had four more years since.