Tutu Wallet —
From Zero to ×128
Built Russia's #1 travel platform's fintech product from scratch as the sole designer. Wallet, BNPL, identity verification, cashback, and loyalty — shipped on 4 platforms in 21 months.
Context
Tutu is Russia's #1 online travel service — 35M+ monthly active users, tickets for trains, planes, buses, hotels, and AI travel assistant. In August 2024, the company had no proprietary payment product. All payments went through third-party acquirers, which meant losing monetization and having no retention tool.
I joined as the sole Lead Designer for the fintech direction with a mandate to build from scratch: an e-wallet, identity verification (115-ФЗ compliance), cashback, BNPL, and loyalty — all integrated into an existing platform with 35M users.
My role
I was the only designer in the fintech team. Full-cycle ownership from day one:
- Customer journey mapping — facilitated team workshops
- UX research — 12 in-depth interviews, 2 prototypes
- Cross-platform design — web, iOS, Android, mono-apps
- Compliance UX — 115-ФЗ, identity verification flows
- Cashback & loyalty design — workshop with 3 guilds, 15 hypotheses
- Design documentation for partner teams
- Front-review process — established and ran
- Pre-analysis process — set up from scratch
Beyond the design work, I built the processes that didn't exist:
- Introduced front-review at the point of development handoff
- Established pre-analysis sessions with PMs before any design starts
- Created design documentation standard for external teams
- Covered loyalty program design when two designers left the team
Research
The central design challenge: 115-ФЗ requires identity verification before users can use wallet functions above certain limits. This is a regulatory obligation — but how you design it determines whether users complete it or abandon the product.
6 Tutu users + 6 users of competing wallets. Ran jointly with a UX researcher.
UPRID flow vs full identification flow — different entry points, different friction levels.
Payment funnel mapped with product and system analysts on a shared Miro board.
3 guilds (designers, UX researchers, UX writers). 15 hypotheses generated and prioritized.
Results
Shipped in 21 months
Reflection
The hardest part wasn't the design — it was designing inside constraints that didn't always have clear answers. 115-ФЗ is a law written for banks, not for travel platforms adding a wallet. Every time a legal or technical constraint blocked a user-friendly solution, I had to find a way to make the regulated flow feel like a product decision, not a legal apology.
Being the only designer for 21 months meant I had to choose every day. What to do myself, what to delegate, what to deprioritize. I built front-review processes not because it was in my job description, but because I watched devs ship things that weren't what I'd designed — and fixed it at the source.
The ×128 number is the team's result. My contribution was the product that made those numbers possible to track and trust.