Boubyan Bank

Context

Boubyan is an Islamic bank routinely named Kuwait’s most loved brand. The engagement was a consumer banking redesign that spanned the mobile app — which housed a new Boubyan Rewards loyalty program — the ATM network, an Apple Watch app, and an iOS home-screen widget. Simpleia led product design; McKinsey Digital ran the product owner track, holding daily standups, owning user stories, and managing prioritization across the bank’s product, compliance, risk, and brand groups. Both firms contracted directly with Boubyan.

Research and discovery

The engagement did not include a primary user research phase — that work sat with McKinsey and the bank. Design decisions were grounded in the user stories and prioritization handed over from the product owner track, competitive analysis of regional Islamic banks (Al Rajhi, KFH, ADIB), banking interaction conventions for high-trust transactions, and Sharia-compliance product requirements that shape disclosure and consent flows in Islamic banking products like Murabaha and Ijara.

Approach

Cross-device consistency meant more than a shared design system. Every journey — transfer, bill pay, financing request — had to have an equivalent, surface-appropriate expression on each device, and handoffs between surfaces had to be first-class. A customer starting a request on the ATM and finishing it on mobile should feel one action, not two. We designed the interaction vocabulary first (commit, confirm, hand off), then let each surface’s affordances shape the presentation.

Rewards architecture

Boubyan Rewards was the most architecturally complex piece of the engagement: a points-based loyalty program built into the mobile app, structured around an Earn / Burn split. Earn handled eligibility, tier introduction, application, default account selection, and terms. Burn handled four redemption paths — bookings, shop, vouchers, and airmiles — plus a separate cashback flow with its own auto-redemption settings. Each redemption path branched on whether the customer had enough points, with a “Pay With Points” fallback for partial redemptions that respected Sharia-compliant cashback handling. Working out this architecture before any visual design happened was where most of the consequential decisions got made.

Solution

Mobile app

ATM

Apple Watch

iOS home-screen widget

Outcome

The redesigned experience shipped across all four consumer surfaces and anchored Boubyan’s digital transformation through the engagement.

Reflection

Working on a transformation of this size taught me how much of enterprise design is organizational work — aligning product, compliance, risk, and brand across a long delivery window. The design system was important, but the forum that reviewed every decision across those four groups mattered more.