What design leadership in Indian fintech actually involves

I am Akash Soti, Director of Design at Pine Labs and Head of Design at Setu, Pine Labs' fintech infrastructure company. Before this I spent seven years at Amazon, some of it on Amazon Pay, and the question I get asked most by designers who want to move into fintech is what the job actually is. Not the title. The job.

Here is my honest answer, from the inside.

Regulation is a design constraint, not a legal footnote

In most product companies, design decides the flow and legal reviews it at the end. In Indian fintech that order is reversed. The RBI decides what a KYC can and cannot do, what consent looks like for an Account Aggregator, how long a merchant's money can sit before settlement. Design's job is to make a regulated flow feel like a product someone chose, rather than a form someone was made to fill.

The best example I have is from Amazon Pay. Remote KYC did not exist as a product in India. We designed and launched an industry-first version that let 4.1 million people upload their official documents from home, cut the time to complete KYC by 80 percent, and cut Amazon's cost by 90 percent. None of that came from a clever screen. It came from reading the regulation closely enough to find the room inside it, and then designing to the edge of that room.

A design leader in fintech has to be able to read a circular and see a flow.

Trust is the product

A payments app is a place people put money. Every interaction either builds the belief that the money is safe or spends it. The interface is never neutral.

At Setu, the design team works across Account Aggregator, identity verification, and Bridge, the merchant portal. Adoption on all three depends on the same thing: a business deciding to trust a piece of infrastructure they cannot see. Clear consent, honest status, errors that say what happened and what to do next. This is unglamorous work and it is the whole job. When the leadership team took Setu from a revenue of six crore to a hundred crore, design's contribution was adoption, and adoption was trust.

The customer is often a business, and the business has customers

Fintech in India is B2B, B2B2C and B2C at once. At Pine Labs I lead design for the Instore vertical, which is POS terminals, kiosks and payment devices, and the Online vertical, which is the payment gateway and the merchant dashboards. The merchant is our customer. The merchant's customer is the person paying. Both have to be designed for, and they want different things: the merchant wants reconciliation and settlement to be boring, the customer wants the payment to be over.

You cannot learn this from analytics. We ran an on-ground benchmarking study across thirteen merchants, from super-enterprise chains with more than 20,000 stores down to mid-market businesses, comparing our POS experience against Paytm, PhonePe and Razorpay at the counter. It surfaced 31 prioritised gaps across payment, settlement, reconciliation and device reliability. Every one of them went into the roadmap and got fixed. A design leader who has not stood at a counter and watched a payment fail does not yet know the product.

The job is running an org, not reviewing screens

The thing nobody tells you about the step up to Head of Design is how little of it is design. It is planning, intake and the quality bar.

At Setu we run quarterly design planning with product leadership: upcoming initiatives, the company's OKRs, and the design debt we are carrying, mapped to who works on what and when. We run a single intake for every request, and requesters have to write down the problem and what success looks like before a designer touches it. We send a biweekly design newsletter to stakeholders so nobody has to ask what design is doing. None of this is exciting. All of it is what lets a team of eight designers serve a company that is growing faster than it can hire.

The quality bar is the other half. Someone has to decide what good means for a payment device in a shop in Jaipur, and hold every release to it. That is the design leader. It cannot be delegated.

What to ask a design leader in fintech

If you are hiring one, or trying to become one, these are the questions that separate people who have done this from people who have designed nice apps.

• Show me a flow you shipped inside a regulation. What did the regulation say, and where did you find the room?
• How did you know your customers trusted the product? Not liked it. Trusted it.
• What did you learn at a counter, in a branch, or on a sales beat that the data did not tell you?
• How does a request reach your team, and how do you decide what not to do?

The craft matters. It is the entry ticket. The job is everything around it.