About
Victor Adedini. I design financial products in Africa and build the front end that ships them.
ABOUT ME
I’m Victor Adedini. Five years designing financial products, across five countries, for millions of people who need the thing to work on the first try.
I trained as an architect before I moved into product. It shows: I start with structure, not surface. Retention, trust, onboarding — these are structural problems wearing interface costumes, and you cannot fix a structural problem with a nicer button.
I also write the code. The thing that ships is the thing that was designed.
WHAT I BELIEVE
There is no objective good design.
Only less wrong design, for this paradigm, this context, this moment. The textbooks sell universals. Five years of shipping across five markets teaches you they do not exist.
Friction is a signal.
Effortless says trivial. Effort says this matters. A locked door and an open door tell you different things, and in finance you often want the locked door.
Boredom is mastery, not failure.
The industry confuses boredom with abandonment. A bored user who has internalised your system opens it every single day. M-Pesa is boring. That is the achievement.
African problems need African frameworks.
Bauhaus, Swiss grids and the Stripe aesthetic were built for users who already trusted banks. Most of this continent’s workforce is informal. Imported doctrine fails them, then blames them.
Retention is structural, not cosmetic.
Not features, not rewards, not a nicer empty state. Lock-in built into how the product sits inside somebody’s actual life.
EXPERIENCE
Senior Product Designer
CARDTONIC · 2023 – NOW
The core fintech products end to end: research, flows, interface, and the front-end that ships them.
Product Designer
RANK · 2021 – 2023
Rebuilt onboarding and KYC to fix activation and meet CBN compliance, working from funnels, usability tests and a KYC audit rather than opinions.
Product Designer, independent
2019 – 2021
Zero-to-one work for early teams across fintech, food and travel: Idle Finance, My Fuud, Akewi, Flight Trackr.
B.Sc. Architecture
2013 – 2018
Where the structure-first habit comes from.
THINGS I WAS WRONG ABOUT
That frictionless was always better
MY FIRST THREE YEARS
I removed every step I could find. What I was actually removing was the signal that told people the thing mattered, and the moment where they decided to trust it.
Your second one goes here
REPLACE ME
Write the real thing: what you believed, what happened, what you do now instead. This section is the most human on the page and it should be in your words, not mine.
NOW
Building
ASK ME ANYTHING
An AI assistant that reads a portfolio and answers questions about it. On this site, and for sale to other designers.
Writing
THE JOURNAL
Long-form on African fintech: retention, onboarding, friction, and why imported design frameworks keep failing here.
Reading
KUHN, STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS
Because paradigms explain more about design disagreements than design theory does.
Based in
LAGOS · TEAMS ANYWHERE