Clip · Head of Design (Employee 2) · 2013–2016

Clip Terminal: bringing card acceptance to Mexico

Designed an end-to-end mobile card acceptance platform for small merchants in a cash-dominant market — research-led, validated in pop-up mercados, and now one of the top FinTechs in Latin America.

$1B+
Pesos processed
7.7M+
Transactions
30K+
Merchants

Card acceptance in Mexico sat at roughly 12% when we started. Clip's job was to make it cheaper, simpler, and more trusted than cash — for the long tail of small merchants the banks had ignored.

01Context

A cash-dominant market with a fraud problem

Mexico's payments landscape in 2013 compounded friction for small merchants: accepting cards required multiple bank relationships, terminal hardware was expensive, and customers themselves were wary — "card cloning" devices were a real and widely-known fraud vector. The default was cash, and an entire merchant tier was left out of the formal economy.

I joined as employee #2 to lead research, UX, and visual design for the MVP — a card reader plus a multi-platform terminal app shipped on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.

Fig. 01

Mercado field testingMexico City

Each iteration of the reader and app was validated at monthly pop-up mercados across Mexico City — real merchants, real transactions, real conditions.

02Approach

Validate every release at a pop-up mercado

Rather than ship behind a dashboard and wait for support tickets, we built a feedback loop into the company's rhythm. Once a month, the team set up a mercado in Mexico City with merchants from the target segment. They swiped real cards, stumbled in the ways usability tests are designed to surface, and those sessions reshaped the product.

Two findings stand out.

Merchants kept swiping the card before entering an amount.

— Pop-up mercado field test

03Craft

One product, three platforms, one identity

The MVP shipped on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. The terminal app, the merchant onboarding flow, and the reader hardware all shared a single visual system, anchored on the orange that the mercado tests had given us permission to lean into.

Fig. 02

Terminal app — iOS, Android, Windows Phone

The terminal experience across all three major mobile platforms of the era; the orange identity carried through hardware, app, and merchant-facing communications.

04Outcome

From employee #2 to a top Latin-American FinTech

More than $1B in pesos processed, 7.7M+ transactions, 30K+ active merchants by the time my chapter at the company closed. More importantly, the loop we built — ship, mercado, learn, iterate — became the default operating mode for the design and product teams for years afterward.

Clip is now one of the largest payments companies in Latin America.