MarTrust
A full wallet rebuild for a global maritime fintech, mobile, web, physical card, and onboarding for tens of thousands of seafarers, delivered in under six months.
Overview
Making complex, cross-border money movement feel as simple as a consumer banking app.
MarTrust provides digital wallets and financial services to tens of thousands of seafarers worldwide, a workforce with limited connectivity, high cross-border payment needs, and little tolerance for financial friction. I led product design on a full rebuild of MarTrust's core crew account: web app, mobile app, physical card, and first-time onboarding.
The users are often at sea, offline, and managing money for families thousands of miles away. Every flow had to read as simple and trustworthy, even when the logic underneath (multi-currency balances, FX, intermediary fees, employer-sponsored benefits) was anything but.
The challenge
Rebuilding financial infrastructure, with a live user base and a hard six-month deadline.
This wasn't a redesign of a consumer app. It was a rebuild of financial infrastructure for a workforce with a distinct set of constraints, with near-zero tolerance for disrupting the seafarers and shipping companies already depending on it.
- A six-month deadline for a full-platform rebuild, mobile, web, and physical card
- Users with irregular connectivity and uneven financial literacy
- Complex multi-currency, cross-border fee and FX logic that had to read as simple and honest
- Two audiences in one system: individual seafarers and shipping companies
- Migrating an active user base with minimal disruption
The core tension: speed versus accuracy, simplicity versus honesty, money had to move fast and offline, while every fee and rate stayed completely transparent.
Working process
Embedded with the team from day one, shaping roadmap, brand, and product together.
I worked as lead product designer alongside commercial, engineering, and product from kickoff, not designing in isolation and handing off, but making decisions together as a team.
Alignment before screens
A two-day Discovery Workshop in Berlin: walking the existing product live to log real pain points, a Value Proposition exercise to define what the product was and wasn't, and end-to-end journey mapping to decide what to build first. A Brand Jam turned it into a repositioned identity to design against.
Testing in tight loops
Rather than one usability round at the end, continuous testing cycles throughout the build. Every piece of feedback was tagged by type, quick fix, MVP-2.0 scope, praise worth protecting, and mapped directly onto the screen it affected, so engineering and I could triage in real time.
A design system built to scale
A Figma design system synced to live code with engineering, so new flows, crew payroll, vendor payments, benefits, could be assembled from shared, production-accurate components instead of designed from scratch each time.
Discovery Workshop, Berlin, walking the existing product live and mapping seafarer and employer journeys end to end.
The MarTrust BrandJam on Miro (left) and feedback from continuous testing loops (right), tagged by type and mapped onto the flows they affected.
Key decisions
Where the design work carried the most weight.
Designing trust into the transfer flow
Sending money home had to make fees, exchange rates, and employer-sponsored benefits completely transparent. The "you send / they receive" breakdown surfaces the exchange rate, intermediary bank fees, and employer-covered costs up front, no guessing what lands on the other end.
One wallet, built for a very specific life
Multi-currency balances, a physical card, and quick actions sit alongside employer-provided benefits with visible expiry. Card control, load, unload, freeze, reveal PIN, is single-tap, designed so a crew member on a ship with poor signal can act fast and without confusion.
Two products, one system
A crew-facing app and marketing site plus a companies-facing payroll dashboard, sharing one visual and component language, so the brand held together across very different jobs-to-be-done.
Mapping every flow before building any of them
The full information architecture, accounts, send money, request, activity, messaging, was mapped early to catch overlaps and edge cases before they became engineering rework.
Outcomes & impact
25,000+ seafarers onboarded to the new platform, with hundreds more joining daily
Full redesign, web, mobile, physical card, and onboarding, delivered in under six months
A new Figma design system synced to live code, cutting implementation time on new features
Rising NPS reflecting improved crew satisfaction
Faster rollout by shipping companies and reduced operational cost from shifting cash-based to digital disbursement
What the client said
“BeTheLeap worked with us to deliver something better than we'd imagined. Over 25,000 seafarers are now using the new account, with adoption growing daily. We've seen higher NPS, stronger engagement from shipping companies, and faster rollouts, all thanks to the speed, flexibility, and clarity BeTheLeap brought.”