Scope
Finanzcheck is Germany's leading independent comparison portal for installment credit and private financial products. The platform sits between consumers and lenders — a regulated funnel that has to clear strict legal, financial, and consumer-protection requirements while still converting. Conversion in this space isn't optimization theatre. It's the difference between people getting credit decisions in minutes versus abandoning the form three steps in.
The company's priority at the time was unambiguous: produce results. Side projects were cut. The work that lived close to revenue was the work that got resourced.
I came in as Lead Product Designer with two lead-UX remits running in parallel — the consumer-facing Finanzcheck app and the landing-page conversion for the credit funnel.
The credit funnel — the version that shipped was the slimmer one
The brief was direct: redesign the credit funnel. The existing funnel was the kind that converts despite itself — long, dense, asking too much of the user too early.
The redesign approach was conversational. Question by question, one screen at a time, with a progress bar at the top. Anything that could be answered later in the advisor call was moved off the funnel to lighten what the user had to do upfront.
The roadmap had more on it than the redesign as shipped. Auto-extraction from ID photos, payslip photos, and bank statement photos — designed to reduce friction further by letting the funnel pull data from documents the user already had on their phone. We wanted those features. We had designs. We knew they'd help.
We didn't get to ship them. The workload was real, time-to-market mattered, and the call was made: ship the slimmed conversational funnel first, sequence the photo-upload features for the next iteration. It was the right call. The slimmed funnel performed — a double-digit conversion uplift, validated through A/B testing in production traffic. The photo-upload features stayed on the roadmap with a clear case for them, made stronger by what the slimmed funnel proved.
With Google Germany
The funnel work ran in collaboration with Google Germany — what my CV captures as "Led functional UX with Google Germany."
We partnered with Google Germany and met all their criteria. Specifically:
- First Contentful Paint and Largest Contentful Paint within Web Vitals thresholds
- Page weight and above-the-fold rendering optimised for mobile-first delivery
- Web Vitals compliance across the funnel
- Mobile-first responsive structure — meaningful, not cosmetic, given the funnel ran majority-mobile
- Form ergonomics on mobile — input modes, autocomplete, keyboard types, smart defaults, conditional logic, pre-validation
- Conversion-coded copy, paired with a UX copywriter and tested per variant
- A/B testing discipline aligned with Google's controlled-experiment standard
The conversion architecture — social proof, trust badges, comparison structures, the visual hierarchy of the funnel itself — came from the design team's work.
The app
The other lead-UX remit was the consumer-facing Finanzcheck app — the mobile experience for credit comparison and management.
The user research surfaced a real blind spot: many consumers don't fully understand what counts as credit in their own financial life. Installment purchases, overdraft on a current account, credit card limits — all credit. Umschuldung — refinancing — was widely misunderstood as risky when, for someone qualified, it's often the financially sensible move.
That blind spot was costing both the user and the business. Users called Finanzcheck advisors with standing questions — can I pause? pay off early without a fee? how high is the interest? how far along am I? — that the app could have answered. Advisor time spent answering those questions was advisor time not generating revenue.
The app's design did the work that should reduce that load. It surfaced refinancing eligibility — a win for the user (saving money) and for Finanzcheck (refinancing generates revenue). It showed all the user's commitments, conditions, progress, and options in one place. It anticipated the standing questions and answered them in the interface.
The app did not ship to production within my engagement. That's honest. The work is in the Arbeitszeugnis as work performed — verified scope, designed and prototyped — and what it would have done is what user research said it should.
Conversion design — what came from the team
Beyond Google's bar on performance, the conversion architecture itself came from the design team's work. A non-exhaustive list of what landed in the funnel and on the landing pages:
- Customer testimonials with photos and names
- Trust badges — TÜV, Stiftung Warentest, partner banks, certification logos
- Risk-reversal language — 100% kostenlos, unverbindlich
- Comparison tables that showed what we offered against the alternatives
- Calculator widgets that personalised the offer before the user committed to the funnel
- Estimated time-to-decision callouts — In 2 Minuten zur Antwort
- Inline help and tooltips for the fields users hesitate on
- Plain-language explanations for regulated financial terms
These are the moves a senior CRO designer makes. None of them are dramatic. All of them compound.
Role
Per my CV and the Arbeitszeugnis from Henrik Westermann (Chief Business Development Officer):
- Lead Product Designer — full design responsibility on app and funnel
- Led functional UX with Google Germany on the landing-page conversion work
- CRO Lead — optimised app and landing-page conversion via A/B tests, user interviews, and ideation
- Lead UX for the Finanzcheck app
- Lead UX for landing-page conversion-rate optimization
- User flows, visual designs, prototypes, user interviews
- Worked in collaboration with a UX copywriter on conversion-coded copy
- Contribution to the Finanzcheck design system
- Optimization and extension of the internal CRM system
Reflection
Sometimes the version that ships is the one without the features you wanted most. The photo-upload work was the right idea and the wrong moment. Cutting it to ship the slimmed funnel was the senior call, and the funnel's performance made the case for the photo-upload features stronger than the original pitch could have.
Conversion in regulated financial products is real product work, not optimization theatre. Every variant tested has to clear legal and consumer-protection requirements before it goes live. The funnel doesn't get fast wins — it gets disciplined wins, taken under constraint.
User research uncovered the blind spot. The app didn't ship within my engagement, but the research did its job: it identified that consumer credit literacy itself was the friction the platform could remove. That insight outlasted the app.
The shape of the work. Lead Product Designer across two parallel tracks — app and landing-page conversion — coordinated through a cross-functional team in agile cadence. Continuous discovery (user interviews, A/B testing, ideation paired with the UX writer) ran in parallel with delivery. Roadmap definition and feature prioritization made under time-to-market pressure: photo-upload features sequenced for next iteration, slimmer conversational funnel shipped first. Controlled experiments validated each move in production traffic. I also managed freelance designers brought onto the engagement.
"Herr Cherif verfügt über ein hervorragendes und auch in Randbereichen sehr tiefgehendes Fachwissen, welches er in unser Unternehmen stets in höchst gewinnbringender Weise einbrachte. Aufgrund seiner genauen Analysefähigkeit und seiner enormen Auffassungsgabe war er jederzeit in der Lage, auch schwierige Situationen sofort zutreffend zu erfassen und schnell gute Lösungen zu finden."
— Henrik Westermann, Chief Business Development Officer, FINANZCHECK.de Arbeitszeugnis