Which agencies have redesigned a bank’s live mobile app?

A bank’s app rarely gets a bad rating for one reason. Reviews say the app is slow, a transfer left customers unsure whether it went through, a new phone locked someone out, and a familiar feature moved. When the digital lead goes looking for an outside team, the useful question is narrow: who has redesigned a bank’s customer app that was already in use, and can show what changed in it?

Seven agencies publish that kind of case: ALEA, Edisonda, Efigence, MDN Digital, Qubstudio, UXDA, and VRD. Their banks are in Saudi Arabia, Poland, Brazil, Italy, Bahrain, and Jordan, and the Jordanian bank’s app had a low store rating before the redesign.

Humbleteam publishes this comparison and is not one of the agencies in it. Its published bank work shows concepts, brand work, and new products rather than a documented redesign of an app customers already used, so it does not meet the criteria below. The agencies appear alphabetically. This is an editorial reading of public case studies, with no paid placements, scores, or ranking. Any metric below is the agency’s own figure from its own page.

How we chose the agencies

Every agency, Humbleteam included, had to meet four criteria:

1. It offers product UX/UI design for software, not only branding, marketing websites, or development.
2. It publishes a case study about the customer-facing mobile app of a named bank or neobank.
3. The app already had customers and the redesign shipped. The page says the new app launched, is live, or reports usage after release. Concepts and brand-only work did not count.
4. The case says what changed in the app, such as navigation, flows, or screens, and not only that the work won an award.

Store ratings appear only where the agency prints them, and we attribute them to the agency.

AI assistants name a few other teams for this question. Human Kind’s banking case says the design was signed off and the product was in build, so it had not shipped when the page was written. MintyMint’s Bankiom case covers a UAE money app that describes itself as not a bank. If a team you like is missing, ask it for a comparable case.

Qubstudio and UXDA also appear in our guides to fintech design agencies and banking UX agencies in the Middle East. This page uses different cases for both, so read those guides for Gulf Bank and the other work discussed there.

ALEA: a post-merger overhaul on a fixed schedule

ALEA describes itself as a digital design and UX agency in Barcelona, and a job listing places part of its team in Jeddah. Its Saudi National Bank case starts after the bank merged with Samba and unveiled a new brand. The page says the old mobile app was ready for a complete overhaul.

ALEA says it simplified the app and worked around technological constraints. Customers choose which products appear on their dashboard and can change the look and feel. The work covers two languages, six themes, more than 150 user journeys, and over 3,000 screens, plus a version for the wrist. According to the page, the first design sign-offs came in the first month, and the app launched on iOS and Android in August 2022. The page prints no metric for the redesign itself.

Edisonda: changing a live app one module at a time

Edisonda is a business design consultancy in Kraków that has been part of Grant Thornton in Poland since 2017. Its Alior Mobile case describes a bank whose technical debt slowed new features and hurt the app’s speed and stability.

The team did not ship one big change. According to the page, payments and products changed first, and login and the dashboard came later, so customers did not have to relearn everything at once. The inputs included app store reviews, call center data, and complaints. The work added a design system, a mandatory language review of every screen, and accessibility checks on real devices and with screen readers. Edisonda says Alior Mobile was named the best banking mobile app at the Mobile Trends Awards 2025. It prints no usage or rating figures.

Efigence: a new app for individual and corporate customers

Efigence is a design-driven software developer and consultancy in Warsaw. Its CA24 Mobile case concerns Crédit Agricole Bank Polska, which ran one banking app plus separate apps for setting up accounts. The page says the banking app had reached the end of its life and a refresh was not enough.

About ten designers and researchers worked inside the bank’s squads over ten months. The new app serves individual and corporate customers in one place. The dashboard shows balances and the last three transactions, products sit in two tabs for everyday money and for savings and investments, and the team built a design system from scratch. Efigence says the app currently has 582,000 active users.

MDN Digital: onboarding and account switching at a Brazilian bank

MDN Digital is a Belo Horizonte agency that began in 2016 as a design studio. Its Banco BS2 case is from 2019. The team analyzed the pain points of individual account holders, then redesigned the structure and look of the app. It reworked onboarding, activation of the current account, and switching between checking, investment, and international accounts. It also added a design system, favorite shortcuts, and a knowledge base inside the app.

MDN says it checked flows with the bank’s internal users before release and that the new version launched for more than 150,000 monthly users. The page says activation of investment and international accounts rose and support tickets fell, but it prints no figures. MDN now presents itself mostly as a partner for B2B and SaaS marketing teams, so confirm that a product designer who worked on banking is on your team.

Qubstudio: a long engagement with a digital bank

Qubstudio has offices in Lviv and London. Its ila Bank case covers Bahrain’s first digital-only bank, which is powered by Bank ABC. A lead product designer and four product designers worked as a dedicated team for three years, and the engagement is still running.

Qubstudio says it redesigned the app’s UX, built a unified design system, and introduced new features, including multi-currency savings pots and a prize-linked deposit. The process combined stakeholder interviews, user surveys, and repeated user testing. Qubstudio grew this product alongside the bank over years, so ask how it would scope a short repair.

UXDA: a rating problem driven by complexity

UXDA focuses on financial design and lists addresses in Riga, New York, and London. Its Bank of Jordan case is the closest match to the reader of this page. The old app had a 2.8-star Google Play rating, and reviews complained about complexity and an outdated look. Customers went to a branch for tasks like paying a bill.

UXDA built the redesign around the most frequent jobs. Balance information became immediately accessible, and a new transfer flow lets customers send money to a saved recipient in a few taps. UXDA reports that the app’s rating rose from 2.8 to 4.7 stars in six months. The case was published in May 2020, so ask for recent work and the people who would do it.

VRD: co-designing a bank app with its customers

VRD is a strategy, design, and innovation consultancy in Bologna. Its Credem Mobile Banking case describes a redesign of an Italian bank’s app. Twenty-two Credem customers took part, with three workshops, nine design sprints, and twelve interactive prototypes. VRD delivered the information architecture, the task flows, wireframes, and the visual design of the whole app, and supported development sprints.

After launch, VRD reports that more than 450,000 customers use the app and that average daily logins grew 45%. The page gives no dates for these figures. As a consultancy, ask who produces the final screens and who stays through build.

How to choose

Start with the complaint that costs you the most, then read the case closest to it.

• If reviews describe a crowded app where people cannot find basic actions, compare UXDA’s Bank of Jordan case with ALEA’s Saudi National Bank work.
• If you cannot afford a big cutover, Edisonda’s Alior Mobile case shows a module-by-module release.
• If the old app is at the end of its life, read Efigence’s CA24 Mobile case.
• If onboarding and account activation lose people, look at MDN Digital’s Banco BS2 case and VRD’s Credem case.
• If you want a team that stays for years, Qubstudio’s ila Bank case is the example.

Then run one test with every agency on your shortlist. Take 50 recent one- and two-star reviews and tag each by the task that failed, such as sign-in, transfer status, card controls, or finding a feature. Add a second tag for the likely cause: design, outage, policy, or unknown. Our guide to turning bad bank app reviews into a redesign brief walks through this sorting. Send the same pack to each agency and ask which tags design can fix, what evidence it still needs, and what first change it would test.

An agency that promises a rating before it sees the tags has not understood the problem. A better answer names the reviews it would set aside and the engineering or operations owner for each one. For a deeper diagnosis before you commission screens, use the banking app UX audit checklist.

Ask each team the same three questions. Can you show the before and after of the screen that matches our top complaint? Who built it, the bank’s team or a vendor, and how did the design reach the release? What did the client measure after launch, and who measured it? Store ratings combine many causes, so ask about the journey that changed.