Designing Jamaica's first CBDC wallet experience

The brief

When NCB Financial Group launched Lynk in December 2021, the brief was deceptively simple: build a digital wallet that Jamaicans would actually use. That meant competing with cash in a country where 80% of transactions are still physical, onboarding people who had never used a banking app, and, within seven months, becoming the first, and at launch the only, platform authorised to carry it.

JAM-DEX: designing for a world first

JAM-DEX launched in July 2022, making Jamaica one of the first countries in the world to put a live retail CBDC into consumers' hands. I led the UX for the CBDC onboarding and wallet experience, the only platform the Bank of Jamaica authorised to carry it. The design challenge wasn't just technical. It was behavioural: convincing people to trust a new form of money when cash had been the default their entire lives. By the end of July 2022, more than 120,000 people and 2,300+ merchants were on Lynk.

Remittance: removing the queue

Jamaica receives billions in remittances annually, but collecting them meant standing in line. In March 2023, I designed the Lynk Remittance feature, a first for any digital wallet in Jamaica, integrating MoneyGram directly into the app so users could receive money from abroad in seconds, straight to their phones, with no queues and no fees. Western Union followed. Active users doubled and transaction volume grew 300% within two months of launch.

Mobile top-up and the Visa virtual card

The Mobile Top-Up feature made Lynk a daily utility, generating over $1.5M USD in transactions and a 1.6× lift in weekly engagement. I also shaped the end-to-end design of the Lynk Visa Virtual Card: Jamaica's first Visa-powered spending option inside a national digital wallet. I mentored the feature designer, owned design review, and drove the experience from concept.

How we validated

Every major flow was tested in Maze before a single line of production code was written. Tested flows averaged a 90% task success rate in Maze, giving engineering and compliance the confidence to move fast, and drastically cutting post-launch rework.