Designing a scalable subscription and benefits ecosystem for
Neo Financial.
Company: Neo Financial
Year: 2025
Role: Product Design Lead
About
Memberships was a major evolution of Neo Financial’s monetization strategy.
Neo’s previous subscription program, Perks, primarily gave paying customers access to better cashback rates and merchant offers. Memberships expanded that model into a broader, profile-level benefits ecosystem that could connect benefits across Neo’s entire product portfolio.
Instead of treating a subscription as an isolated product, we designed Memberships as a layer across the Neo ecosystem. Depending on their membership tier, customers could gain access to premium interest rates, fee waivers, enhanced cashback, insurance, exclusive features, and products such as secured credit cards.
The opportunity was both commercial and customer-focused. Neo could create a stronger recurring-revenue model while giving customers access to benefits traditionally associated with premium banking products.
This was particularly relevant for customers building or rebuilding their credit. Instead of requiring a high income, large balance, or premium credit profile to receive meaningful banking benefits, Memberships could provide a path to a more premium financial experience while customers continued building their financial profile.
My role
I led Product Design for Memberships, partnering with Product, Engineering, Research, Brand, and other product teams.
My role was to define Memberships not just as a feature, but as a scalable system across Neo’s ecosystem. I combined product strategy, systems thinking, research, interaction design, and hands-on execution to create a modular framework that teams could reuse across products, benefits, paywalls, and partnerships.
The challenge
Memberships introduced complexity across the customer experience, product ecosystem, and underlying business rules.
We needed to make multiple tiers and benefits easy to understand, while supporting very different financial products and standardizing eligibility, billing, upgrades, downgrades, discounts, and benefit access.
At the same time, the system had to be flexible enough for other product teams to integrate Memberships independently without relying on the core team for every implementation.
The design challenge therefore became:
"How might we create a membership model that feels simple to customers while remaining flexible enough to scale across Neo's entire product ecosystem?"
Design process
1. Understanding the market:
I started by conducting a competitive benchmark covering both direct financial competitors and companies with mature subscription ecosystems outside banking. Rather than focusing only on pricing and feature lists, I looked at how different companies structured the entire membership experience.
Looking outside financial services was particularly useful because industries such as streaming, travel, commerce, and software had already developed mature interaction models around subscriptions.
The benchmark helped us establish both patterns worth borrowing and approaches we deliberately wanted to avoid.
2. Testing the value proposition with customers:
We then conducted customer research to understand how people perceived the proposed Memberships model before committing to the final structure. Through focus groups, we evaluated potential benefits across different membership tiers, It also reinforced an important principle for the system: higher membership tiers should always feel additive.
Customers should never upgrade and discover that they had lost something they previously had. That principle eventually became part of the underlying membership model.
Customers should never upgrade and discover that they had lost something they previously had. That principle eventually became part of the underlying membership model.
The research influenced both the composition of the membership tiers and the way we communicated their value.
3. Designing the system before designing the screens:
One of the most important decisions we made was to avoid treating Memberships as a collection of isolated experiences. Before going deep into high-fidelity UI, I explored how the underlying membership model would interact with Neo's existing products, stress-tested different approaches against real scenarios across credit cards, savings accounts, rewards, fees, and other features.
This allowed us to identify which concepts needed to exist at a system level and which could remain specific to individual product teams. The result was a model where membership belongs to the customer profile rather than to an individual product. Every Neo customer belongs to a membership tier, including a free tier.
Individual products can then reference that membership status when determining whether a feature or benefit is available. For example, a customer might have access to a savings account regardless of their membership, while a higher interest rate within that account could require a particular membership tier.
The product remains accessible; the premium capability becomes the entitlement.
The product remains accessible; the premium capability becomes the entitlement.
This distinction allowed us to introduce membership benefits throughout Neo without creating a separate eligibility model for every product.
4. Exploration, prototyping and validation:
Throughout the project, I used iterative design exploration to test possible interaction models before committing to implementation. Early concepts were deliberately stress-tested against existing features and the Design System.
I looked for places where we could reuse established behavior instead of introducing additional product or engineering complexity. Where new behavior was necessary, I explored several alternatives and evaluated how each approach would scale across different Memberships scenarios.
Promising concepts were then developed into interactive prototypes and evaluated through usability testing.
Rather than treating research as a validation checkpoint at the end of the process, we used findings to continuously refine the solution.
Tests outputs were translated into concrete design changes, prioritized, and brought into subsequent iterations.
Tests outputs were translated into concrete design changes, prioritized, and brought into subsequent iterations.
Memberships as a system
Memberships was designed as a profile-level system rather than something tied to a specific product. Every customer belongs to a membership tier, and products across Neo can use that status to determine access to features, rates, fee waivers, or standalone benefits such as insurance.
The subscription model follows a consistent set of rules across the ecosystem: benefits are cumulative across tiers, upgrades take effect immediately with prorated billing, downgrades take effect at the next renewal, and eligible discounts are applied automatically based on defined conditions.
By centralizing these rules, product teams could introduce new membership-gated experiences without creating new eligibility or subscription logic each time.
Designing reusable interaction patterns
As Memberships expanded, it became clear that one of our biggest opportunities was not simply designing individual screens but establishing reusable patterns for how membership should appear throughout Neo. Without a shared pattern, each product team could have solved this independently, creating inconsistent interactions throughout the app.
I redesigned the paywall experience as a reusable product pattern and documented how and when it should be used. The goal was not simply visual consistency. The pattern encoded a common interaction model and information hierarchy that teams could reuse when introducing gated functionality.
That work became an early example of a broader practice I helped introduce within the design team: documenting interaction patterns alongside visual components.
Instead of the Design System only answering “What component should I use?”, we started creating guidance around “How should this type of product interaction work?”
That approach was later adopted more broadly by the team.
Extending the Design System
Neo already had a mature Design System implemented both in design and in code.
A principle I established for Memberships was that we should not build a parallel visual language simply because the project introduced new requirements. The final experience relied heavily on existing system components and conventions.
A principle I established for Memberships was that we should not build a parallel visual language simply because the project introduced new requirements. The final experience relied heavily on existing system components and conventions.
However, Memberships also exposed gaps in the system.
When that happened, my responsibility was to determine whether the problem should be solved locally or whether it represented a reusable need that belonged in the Design System. This ensured that Memberships contributed back to the shared product infrastructure rather than accumulating project-specific UI.
More importantly, the project expanded our understanding of the Design System beyond components. By introducing reusable interaction patterns such as the Memberships paywall, we began documenting product behavior in addition to visual building blocks.
That improved consistency while giving designers and product teams clearer guidance and greater autonomy.
Results
Memberships successfully replaced Neo's previous Perks subscription program and has now been operating in production for more than a year. What started as a subscription redesign became a broader monetization and entitlement layer across Neo's product ecosystem.
New product and feature initiatives now consider Memberships as part of their requirements, demonstrating that the framework became part of Neo's product infrastructure rather than remaining an isolated feature. The program also became an important recurring-revenue stream for the business and contributed to shortening the payback period on customer acquisition cost.
Memberships became particularly relevant within Neo's secured credit offering, with a large proportion of secured-credit customers participating in paid membership tiers.
Beyond its direct business impact, the project created reusable infrastructure for future monetization. New benefits can be introduced without designing a new subscription model each time. Product teams can gate functionality using an established entitlement model, reuse standardized upgrade experiences, and place new benefits within the existing tier structure.
The work also had an impact on Neo's design practice.
Patterns developed during Memberships—particularly around paywalls and interaction-pattern documentation—helped establish a more systematic approach to designing reusable product behavior across teams.
Memberships is now used across experiences including:
• product acquisition funnels
• credit products
• savings and banking features
• fee waivers
• rewards
• premium functionality
• partnerships
• secured credit products