What 11Onze Taught Me About Building Fintech for Trust
Building a digital bank for a community with a complex relationship with Spanish financial institutions required a different kind of product
When I started work on 11Onze — a digital bank built specifically for the Catalan community — I expected the main design challenge to be technical: building a modern fintech app with current account, savings, and community features.
The actual challenge was more fundamental: how do you design a financial product for a community whose relationship with the institutions of the Spanish state — including its banks — is historically fraught?
Community as Product
11Onze wasn't just a banking app. It was built around a private social network for Catalan speakers — a community layer that sat alongside the financial product and gave members a reason to engage with the brand beyond their monthly statement.
This shaped every design decision. The onboarding experience emphasised community membership as much as account opening. The home screen surfaced community content alongside account balances. The language of the product — both literally, in Catalan, and figuratively — was carefully considered to feel like it came from within the community rather than being imposed on it from outside.
Trust as a Design Material
In mainstream consumer fintech, trust is largely a function of brand recognition and security signals. In 11Onze, trust had to be earned differently — through transparency, through community governance, and through a product that demonstrably put Catalan savers' interests first.
We designed explicit transparency into the product: clear explanations of how customer deposits were used, how interest was calculated, and how community initiatives were funded. What might feel like over-explanation in a mainstream banking app felt like respect in this context.
The Blockchain Layer
11Onze also incorporated blockchain-based features for certain financial products — an area where the gap between technical possibility and user comprehension is enormous. Designing these features required stripping out all of the blockchain jargon and presenting the benefits in plain terms: better rates, more transparency, verifiable transactions.
The lesson I took from this was one I've applied across many subsequent projects: the sophistication of the underlying technology is inversely proportional to its visibility in the user interface. The better the engineering, the less the user should need to think about it.
What This Means for Financial Product Design
- Understand the emotional relationship your users have with money and with institutions before you design a single screen.
- Community features in financial products are underutilised — they build engagement that purely transactional apps can't match.
- Trust is earned through specificity, not reassurance. Tell users exactly what happens with their money.
11Onze was one of the most intellectually demanding product design projects I've worked on — and one of the most rewarding.
