Wise Branch Demo

The space was open to everyone, from existing Wise customers to people who'd never heard of us. The goal wasn't to replicate the app, since people can already do that on their phone. It was to create something tangible and engaging that existed beyond the product itself.

Something you'd pick up, figure out on your own, and want to keep exploring, with no instructions or guided tour, just an experience that felt worth your time whether you were already a customer or had never opened the app.

The first thing we made wasn't a demo, it was a wireframe prototype. We needed stakeholder sign-off on scope before anything went near a build tool, covering what features were in, what was out, where content was missing, and what compliance needed to review, all of which involved a fair amount of back and forth before anything was locked.

That process wasn't glamorous but it meant by the time we started building, the big decisions were already made. Worth saying that doing this work upfront in standard Figma isn't slowing down. It's what stops you spending credits rebuilding things that weren't right in the first place.

We explored building directly in Claude using the Figma MCP console. It didn't prioritise design quality the way we needed, so we moved to Figma Make.

We started with one flow to test whether the approach worked at all, so we started with the send flow. Reasonably contained, well defined, a decent way to find out what Make could and couldn't handle, and when it did we kept going.

The brand systems team and I worked closely on the design side, going back and forth on content, motion and visual decisions alongside stakeholder and compliance reviews. Once the flows were at roughly 80%, I took over execution, building in Make, refining details, and focusing on getting the whole thing to work as one cohesive experience. When bigger changes were needed mid-build, we went back to design first, without exception.

That last 20% was left deliberately open for animation, interaction details, and whatever came out of actually building the thing. Some of the best stuff came from that space. The UI animation was built in Make using existing Wise motion work from the motion designers as reference. Videos were made by the video animation team and embedded via a Figma Sites workaround, since Make doesn't accept video files directly.

We wanted the demo to feel like the real product, not a simulation of it. Customers picking up the tablet were seeing the actual exchange rate and fees they'd get on a real transfer, because we were pulling live data from the Wise API to power it.

I got the details from engineering, used Claude to handle the integration logic, and set up a Supabase instance to store and serve the rates and fees in real time. If the whole point is showing customers what Wise can do, showing them a made-up number rather than the real one misses the point of the whole thing.

Future Stores is an interactive retail space on Oxford Street. Two weeks, March 30 to April 13, open daily. The demo ran on tablets throughout as a self-service experience.

Staff were on hand for anyone who wanted to go deeper, with free matcha and tote bags for anyone who signed up in store.