Four years transforming a payments institution – from a new brand to the systems moving real money underneath.
A longtime friend, Petr Beťák, was standing up akcenta.digital – a small team tasked with transforming the whole company's digital products. AKCENTA is a Central European payments institution for businesses: currency exchange, international payments and multi-currency accounts, ~51,000 clients across the region. He asked me to join, and I've been there since 2022.
A brand, then a system
My first job was a brand exploration, so the team could start on the first pages and apps; the brand itself was then produced by Dynamo Design. The first thing we shipped was a hiring page – to recruit the specialists who'd carry the transformation – and a few months later the website took its new shape once the rebrand landed.
Underneath, the products had grown in layers over the years: different table styles, inconsistent states, no shared hierarchy from one screen to the next. So with Petr Beťák and Petr Semrád I began laying the first blocks of a UI system – later named Vivid (studio 2Fresh helped for a stretch, four UI designers rotating through) – aiming for one coherent language the website, the internal tools and the apps could all share.
As the scope grew, Adam Černík joined as Lead UI Designer. Tomáš Škrkoň came on a little later; we split the application between us, with Adam overseeing the whole.
Building it from the outside
By the time Adam and Tomáš arrived, I'd already built the cornerstone of Delta, the internal system, and a large part of a genuinely complex onboarding – conditions, legal requirements, and all the data the platform needed to generate contracts. From there I owned the iterations: Vivid, the CashAudit app, and Delta, with a few side-trips to build Akcenta News and other pages for the web. Tomáš carried my redesign of OLB, the internal banking, forward.
In a financial product every state carries weight – a wrong rate, a missed confirmation, or an ambiguous error has real operational consequences.
So a lot of the work was less about visual polish and more about making those states defensible: clear hierarchy, honest empty and error states, and confirmation flows you could trust under pressure.
Finishing it from the inside
Once a large part of the transformation was done, the akcenta.digital team was absorbed and I joined Akcenta's internal team on my own, working closely with Kristýna Minářová and, mainly, Miroslav Jůn. This is where a lot of it was actually finished.
We completed onboarding for individuals, sole traders and companies, and built the internal system for managing, reviewing and approving clients and their requests. It's a banking context with real money moving, so every applicant has to be verified – the purpose and country of business, the ownership structure, every company director. All of it had to stay intuitive, work on mobile, and fail-check at every level.
A gap in that flow isn't a UX inconvenience – it's a compliance one.
Apps: mobile, then desktop
The last stretch was the mobile app, where I built a robust foundation – UI, UX, motion, interactive design, personas, feature definition and research. Adam Ráž joined for this phase: he ran most of the user interviews, drove the OLB and the app's UX, and bridged to front-end. I moved to the desktop companion – the same product with a richer toolset, meant to run in tandem with mobile. The app later passed to Futured, a studio focused on mobile.
Outcome
Four years on, a set of products that had grown in layers became one system – Vivid – across the website, the internal tools, and the apps, with a team that can keep extending it. The platform carries ~51,000 businesses, and every surface added along the way – onboarding, approvals, banking – speaks the same language.
The discipline it demanded changed how I work, too: when every state has to be defensible, clarity stops being a style choice and becomes the job.