Our process blends user research, service discovery, UX/UI design, and rapid prototyping to de-risk digital investment and ensure solutions align with financial regulations, customer expectations, and operational workflows. Whether you’re planning a new product, enhancing a digital journey, or shaping an MVP for investment or market launch, we help you build clarity, confidence, and alignment from day one.
By grounding every decision in evidence, usability, and security, we support the creation of digital financial products that work in the real world — not just in concept.
Understanding Research and Design in Financial Services
Designing digital products for financial services isn’t like designing for other sectors. Customer trust is critical. Regulatory compliance is non-negotiable. Systems must be secure, intuitive, and resilient — often simultaneously.
That’s why we take a research-led, risk-aware approach to discovery and design. We bring together service designers, UX/UI specialists, financial technologists, and compliance stakeholders to understand the problems that matter and shape solutions that solve them.
Whether your users are customers, brokers, advisors, underwriters, operations teams, or partners, we focus on uncovering real needs and translating them into viable, scalable, compliant product design. Our team has worked across banking, payments, wealth, lending, and insurance — giving us the insight needed to design solutions that thrive in complex financial ecosystems.
Our Research and Design Process
Every engagement begins with collaborative discovery. We run workshops, interviews, and stakeholder mapping sessions to clarify workflows, pain points, user needs, technology constraints, and regulatory considerations. We ensure each proposed solution supports — not disrupts — operational and compliance processes.
From there, we create user journeys, service blueprints, and experience flows that reflect how people will actually engage with your product. These artefacts guide our UI/UX design phase, where we translate insights into accessible, elegant, and secure interfaces.
We develop interactive prototypes using tools like Figma or code-based proof-of-concepts, enabling early validation and usability testing. This ensures assumptions are challenged early, reducing downstream delivery risk and avoiding costly rework.
Where required, we produce evidence for regulatory and security assessments, including FCA Consumer Duty considerations, operational risk inputs, and alignment with standards such as PSD2, DORA, and ISO 27001.
Benefits of Investing in Research and Design
Strong research and design practices accelerate delivery, reduce risk, and improve customer experience. In financial services, good design goes far beyond aesthetics — it’s about trust, clarity, and compliance.
A well-researched and validated design ensures:
- Your product aligns with real customer and operational needs
- Interfaces are intuitive, inclusive, and optimised for high-stakes interactions
- Accessibility and security are embedded from the start
- Compliance and risk teams are engaged early, reducing barriers later
- Development is faster and smoother with fewer pivots, delays, or cost overruns
Investing in discovery and design provides the foundation for products that are not only technically sound, but commercially viable, scalable, and regulatory-ready.
Why Choose 6B for Research and Design?
At 6B, we bridge the gap between research, compliance, and delivery. We don’t just create attractive prototypes — we design solutions that teams can build, scale, and defend in front of internal governance, regulators, and technical stakeholders.
We’ve helped fintechs shape market-ready MVPs, supported banks in modernising digital journeys, and worked with insurers to design compliant, customer-centric portals and platforms. Our methods are agile, evidence-based, and aligned with financial services standards and security expectations.
We understand what must happen after the prototype is approved — and we design with delivery, compliance, and long-term resilience in mind.
Estimate the Cost of Your Research and Design Project
Please answer a few questions to help our digital financial services consultants accurately assess your needs and calculate a personalised quote quicker.
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Thank you for your request! 🙌 We will review your project and get back to you within 24 hours to share a ballpark estimate.
Want to speak to someone today? Call 6B on 0113 350 1290.
Readiness Checklist for Research and Design
- Clarify the problem statements, objectives, and success measures the work must address
- Identify stakeholder groups (customers, operations, advisors, compliance, risk, technology) and confirm availability for workshops/interviews
- Gather existing workflows, service maps, performance data, and any prior research or feedback
- Define regulatory and security requirements (e.g., FCA Consumer Duty, PSD2, DORA, ISO 27001, authentication standards)
- Prepare sample data, anonymised cases, process scenarios, or customer journeys for prototyping and testing
- Agree on decision-makers and sign-off processes for journeys, prototypes, and design outputs
- Allocate product owners or internal champions who can provide rapid feedback during iteration cycles
Speak To Our Research and Design Experts
Whether you're developing a new digital financial services product or extending an existing solution with Research and Design, 6B brings the technical expertise, financial services insight, and experience needed to accelerate delivery.
