QuadPay · Buy now, pay later
Buy now, pay later, before the category had a name.
I joined QuadPay as the first designer in 2017. At that point it was a logo, a deck, and an idea: bring buy-now-pay-later to the US, where the model barely existed but was already big in Australia and Europe. Three years later we'd shipped the brand, the checkout, the apps, a virtual card, and a physical card. Acquired by Zip in 2020 for $400M.
Client
QuadPay
Role
Founding Product Designer
Team
Product Designer, Co-founders, Engineering Team
Timeline
2017 — 2020
Shipped
Brand, checkout integration, iOS + Android apps, virtual card, physical card, merchant dashboard
The Brief
A new category, no product yet to ship.
The problem
The solution
Product
Started as a checkout. Grew into a wallet.
Buy now, pay later was simple to explain: split a purchase into four interest-free payments over six weeks. Common in Australia and Europe by 2017, mostly unknown to American shoppers. That meant designing for two audiences at once.
Consumers needed to trust a checkout option they'd never heard of. Merchants needed to integrate QuadPay into their checkouts manually, one engineering deal at a time, and they needed conversion data to justify the work. The brand had to be friendly enough for shoppers and credible enough to win merchant pitches.
The first product was the one-tap checkout integration. Once enough partner merchants signed on, that gave us the foothold for everything else: the apps, the dashboard, the cards.
Brand
A vivid identity that could ship as fast as the product.
Building the brand in-house let us iterate at the same pace as the product. We could test a campaign, social posts, and a product update in the same week. Buy now, pay later didn't have a look in the US yet, so we made one. Loud on purpose.
Product evolution
From checkout integration to category wallet.
The first product was a checkout integration: split a purchase into four payments at partner merchants. Once enough partners said yes, we had the merchant network we needed to ship the rest of the product.
The virtual card came next, so customers could use QuadPay anywhere, not just at partner sites. Then the merchant dashboard, an ML-driven discount engine, referrals, and order management. The mobile app went from a receipt log to a full wallet.
Physical card
A VISA card that defaulted to four installments.
Premium users wanted QuadPay outside e-commerce: the coffee shop, the hardware store, anywhere a merchant didn't accept tap-to-pay. The physical card extended the four-installment model to every VISA terminal in the country.
Most of the design work wasn't the card face. It was the unbox. Cards needed to arrive feeling earned, like the kind of thing you keep in your wallet. Activation needed to feel like a moment.
Impact
App Store rating across 343.7K reviews
Active users at acquisition
Acquired by Zip, 2020
What I took from it
Three things I'd carry into the next one.
The first design problem was trust.
BNPL barely existed in the US in 2017. The question wasn't how to stand out from competitors. It was how to look credible enough that someone would let us hold their debit card.
Brand only worked because it lived with the team.
Brand-as-an-agency engagement always lagged the product, in my experience. Building QuadPay's in-house meant a campaign and a product update could ship in the same week. The brand kept up because it was right there in the room.
Solo designer is an org choice as much as a personal one.
Three years as QuadPay's only designer worked because leadership had design sense and could make calls without me in the room. The moment a company starts waiting on design for every decision, solo designer is the wrong shape.
Testimonial
“Santiago is a consummate professional and creative genius who was instrumental in building our brand and product from a standing start. He has a great sense of branding, user experience and thinks deeply about the customer and their interaction with the product. Santiago is a hard worker and is very efficient in creating high quality usable work quickly. I highly recommend him for any startup or company.”
Brad Lindenberg
CEO & Co-founder at QuadPay