Nova
Bank
A challenger bank asked for a facelift. What they needed was a nervous system — we rebuilt the entire mobile experience from zero, from onboarding biometrics to a card that lives on the lock screen.
The
challenge
Nova's legacy app was five years of feature bolting: 14 navigation patterns, three design languages, a checkout flow with 11 screens. Churn during onboarding sat at 68%. The board wanted a redesign; the data said the problem was structural.
Because Cortificial covers both halves — design and architecture — we could treat the interface and the backend contract as one artifact. Every screen we removed deleted an API round-trip with it.
- Onboarding compressed from 11 screens to 4 — 90 seconds, ID scan included.
- A single event-driven BFF replaced 9 REST endpoints per view.
- Design tokens shipped as the same package the app consumes at runtime.
The
system
We designed "Pulse", Nova's internal design system, in Figma and code simultaneously — every token a variable, every variable a published artifact. The card component alone renders in six contexts, from widget to watch.
On the backend, a Go event-gateway streams balance changes over server-sent events; the UI animates money the moment it moves. Users called it "watching my account breathe" in testing — that line became the design principle for everything that followed.