Digital Rebel — building Poland’s first online financial marketplace

Bancovo was created as a “digital rebel” inside Alior Bank – a daughter company tasked with building Poland’s first fully online financial marketplace.

Instead of yet another comparison site, the goal was to let people compare real, binding offers from multiple banks and lenders and complete the whole loan journey online in minutes, without branches or phone calls.

Challenge

From comparison site to fully transactional marketplace

The brief was simple on paper and difficult in reality:

Design a platform where users can enter a small set of data, get real offers from multiple providers, and be granted a loan in minutes.

This meant:

• unifying very different risk models, product structures, and processes across banks and credit companies,
• keeping the UX as simple as a single bank flow, while sitting on top of many back office systems,
• building enough trust that users were willing to share sensitive financial data on a brand new platform.

Discovery

Understanding how people really shop for credit

We started with an extensive discovery phase, using both quantitative and qualitative methods: customer interviews, market research, journey mapping, usability testing, and behavioural analytics (Google Analytics, Hotjar).

The research confirmed a few key points:

• most people already compare offers, but do it manually across multiple sites, banks, and forums,
• they hate long, repetitive forms and are sensitive to any sign of “hidden conditions”,
  they want to know quickly whether they have a real chance of approval, not just an indicative rate,
• mobile is the dominant starting point, but more complex steps often feel safer on a desktop.

These insights shaped the core UX principles: only essential data, clear expectations at every step, and visible progress from “I am just checking” to “I have a binding offer”.

Designing the lead cycle

I designed the lead cycle to feel like a single, coherent journey rather than a patchwork of different lenders.

The entire experience was designed mobile-first, with responsive layouts and controls tailored for touch, but the system was built as a PWA using React so we could deliver a fast, app-like experience in the browser. I worked closely with engineering to ensure UI decisions aligned with performance constraints and that key interactions remained consistent across devices.

Final thoughts and impact

Bancovo turned a fragmented, manual credit shopping process into a single, digital-first marketplace where users could go from comparison to approval in one place. Instead of filling similar forms on multiple sites, they shared data once, saw binding offers tailored to their profile, and completed the process without leaving the platform.

For the organisation, it proved that a bank-backed marketplace could stand as its own product, with its own UX and tech stack, while still integrating with multiple lenders and risk engines. For me, it was a hands-on exercise in designing on top of many heterogeneous systems without exposing that complexity to the user, and it sharpened my thinking about lead cycles, consent, data capture, and trust in financial products – patterns I still use in fintech, marketplaces, and AI-assisted tools.