Unifying 18 fragmented markets into one coherent global fintech platform.
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The website needed to create a more confident and engaging presence, better reflect the brand transition, position PayU as the market leader for merchants and communicate a growing product offering.
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THE CHALLENGE
PayU is one of the world's leading fintech platforms — operating in emerging markets across Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, processing payments for hundreds of thousands of merchants. But their digital presence told a different story.
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Eighteen regional websites. Each built independently. Each with its own navigation structure, its own content logic, its own form architecture. A merchant in Colombia experienced a completely different PayU from a merchant in Poland — not because their needs were different, but because no one had ever designed the global system that connected them.
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The business ambition was clear: transition from a regional payments provider to a recognised global fintech brand. The digital infrastructure needed to make that possible didn't exist yet.
MY ROLE
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I was UX Director on this engagement — leading the full experience design across all 18 markets. I owned the information architecture, navigation structure, forms consolidation, and mobile-first design approach that became the foundation for the entire platform.
I worked directly with PayU's global programme lead and regional heads across all markets, partnering with visual design and development teams to deliver a system that could be adopted locally without losing global coherence.
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Understanding the high level structure of all websites and concepts.
THE IA PROBLEM
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Eighteen websites sounds manageable. Eighteen websites with eighteen different navigation structures, eighteen different content hierarchies, eighteen different form schemas, and eighteen sets of regional stakeholder opinions about what their market needed — that's a different problem entirely.
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The starting point was mapping everything that existed. Every section, every page, every form field across all 18 regional sites. The picture that emerged was one of genuine fragmentation: some markets had product pages that other markets didn't know existed. Form fields that were mandatory in one region were absent in another. Navigation labels that meant something specific in one market translated confusingly in another.
The IA challenge wasn't just design — it was governance. How do you create a framework that is consistent enough to feel like one brand, flexible enough to serve 18 genuinely different markets, and simple enough that regional teams could maintain it without needing a designer in the room?
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Audience needs in the various markets.
WHAT WE BUILT
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The answer was a dynamic living framework — a corporate IA that established the global structure, with a regional template system that allowed each market to adapt within defined boundaries. Navigation was restructured around PayU's core product offering rather than regional market idiosyncrasies — creating a consistent entry point for any merchant anywhere in the world, regardless of which regional site they landed on.
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Forms were the most technically complex workstream. Across 18 markets there were dozens of different form configurations — inconsistent field labels, inconsistent validation logic, inconsistent data requirements. We audited every form across every market, consolidated duplicate fields, standardised the architecture, and established a single form system that regional teams and third-party integrators could work from. For a B2B platform where forms are often the primary conversion point, this was directly commercial work.
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The entire platform was built mobile-first — a deliberate decision given PayU's emerging market focus, where mobile is frequently the primary or only access point for merchants and their customers.
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PayU Design System - Desktop
PayU Design System - Mobile
THE OUTCOME
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All 18 regional markets successfully launched on the unified platform. The website you can visit at payu.com today is the system we designed.
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"Thank you for Athlon's perseverance, professionalism and support. It's been wonderful working with every single member of your team." — Matthew Buccelli, Global Programme Lead, PayU.
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NOTE: Full case study and design system documentation available on request.
