Visa Just Opened Access to Its Product Design System; What’s In It for FinTechs

Payment innovation needs payments infrastructure, and payments infrastructure needs usability. These are the twin engines of scalability, and design contributes heavily to the user experience (UX) layer.

“One of the most difficult things to do is creating exemplary experiences and doing that consistently across a global, regionally diverse product landscape. Visa’s design system helps us do both,” Robb Nielsen, Visa’s senior vice president and global head of design, told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster.

Design systems aren’t new to tech, but applying them at a global scale and in a highly regulated industry like financial services remains no small feat. It’s not surprising that Visa has managed it. What might be surprising is that on Wednesday (April 23), Visa opened up its proprietary system, the Visa Design System (VDS), to the rest of the payments world.

Nielsen described the design system not as Visa’s treasure chest of trade secrets, but as its platform for spreading proven, high-performance patterns across teams and regions.

Visa’s UX framework includes coded components built in modern frameworks like React, Angular and Flutter. They’re not just design mockups but plug-and-play building blocks ready to be dropped into production environments.

If it sounds like the FinTech version of Canva, that’s because it kind of is.

“UX designers want something that’s built on a modern stack, that’s highly performant, highly accessible,” Nielsen said. “We’ve taken the time to make sure our components are built just that way so that users can take them off the shelves and run.”

Payments Innovation Playbook for UX at Scale

In an industry where infrastructure innovation often gets the spotlight, Visa’s move signals something deeper: The UX layer is the next competitive frontier in payments.

And Visa’s not just pulling back the curtain. It’s offering the entire toolkit to its design system: a deeply integrated, rigorously tested framework for building consistent, accessible, and elegant digital payment experiences.

“There’s goodness there for the communities of designers, startups and engineers who can take the VDS system and not spend time thinking about things that have already been solved,” Nielsen said. “They can build their own innovations on top of a design system that exists for them.”

Opening the design system also represents a deeper strategic shift for Visa: a move from platform operator to ecosystem enabler. It’s a vision that echoes the company’s earlier approach to infrastructure, where it invited FinTechs and banks to build on top of its global network, now applied to the experience layer.

After all, whether a startup or an incumbent is looking to accelerate a new offering, time-to-market is everything, yet launching financial products can remain dauntingly complex.

“You’ve got the infrastructure. You’ve got the network. Now you’ve got the user experience,” Nielsen said. “Focus on how you want to monetize that. Don’t spend your time reinventing the presentation layer.”

Ecosystem Thinking, Not Empire Building

The system’s maturity isn’t theoretical. Before this public launch, Visa quietly battle-tested it across internal products by making its own teams use it. The open-source VDS already played a pivotal role in the development of flagship Visa products like Flexible Credential.

“One of the best ways to trial it is to use it yourself,” Nielsen said. “Use it through volunteers, and then force people to use it. And when you’re forced to use something, you get very vocal about how well it’s working.”

That internal use provided valuable feedback not just from designers but from the engineers who needed to plug the components into real-world APIs and workflows. The result is a system hardened by the demands of live deployment, not lab environments.

“The design system supports all of our products pretty similarly,” Nielsen said. “Designers sit with product peers and really imagine what that desired experiential outcome should be. And then we talk with customers, use the user-centered design process, test for usability, and refine. That’s where we get patterns we can stamp into the system.”

The release also comes at a moment of tectonic change in how consumers interact with software. GenAI, voice interfaces, and biometrics are reshaping expectations and not just about how experiences look, but how much effort they require at all.

Ultimately, the value of the system lies not in what Visa has built, but in what others will build on top of it. That’s why it’s open to everyone — developers, designers, enterprises and startups alike via design.visa.com.

And while the system itself doesn’t intrinsically spark innovation, Nielsen believes it removes the barriers that block it. By eliminating the noise of user interface complexity, he said, Visa is helping product teams everywhere tune in to what really matters: building the future of payments, faster and better.