I led product design for Universal Payment Request, a system that lets any market turn on structured payments through configuration rather than a bespoke, ground-up build. Before this work, WhatsApp had structured payment experiences in only two markets, each requiring large teams and 6 to 12 months of custom engineering, legal, and design work. My core reframe was to stop designing country-specific features and start designing payment method archetypes, including bank transfers, digital wallets, and mobile money, that each market activates through configuration. Every piece was designed as a self-contained module, so engineering builds it once and toggles features on or off per market with a config change. The result is a single design language that serves two very different customers through one shared artifact: a shop owner sending a payment request from a chat, and an enterprise merchant sending the same request programmatically at scale.

The work spanned the full system, from onboarding logic that absorbs thousands of bank and wallet permutations, to a modular payment bubble designed with reserved space for capabilities that will ship later, to a progressive upgrade path where merchants integrate once and buyers automatically get richer experiences over time. I partnered closely with engineering, design systems, partnerships, and policy and legal, and took the work through sequenced design reviews across both the API and small business experiences. The system is designed to compress market launches from months to weeks, with expansion targets spanning dozens of countries, and it gives the company's AI commerce agents a structured foundation to send payment requests on a seller's behalf.

If you'd like to hear more about the design process, decisions, and details, please get in touch to inquire.