Designing fintech that scale globally.
At Mastercard's Creative Studio, designing systems and platforms that power global banking partnerships from early demos to production-ready experiences.
Amritansh Pandey
Selected Work
Case Studies
Product explorations addressing complex business and user constraints across fintech, commerce, and early-stage startups.
01AI Commerce · Mastercard
Agent Pay — The Silent Guardian · Mastercard's Role in AI-led Payments
Built the UX research toolkit, multi-sensory trust framework, and the React + Claude AI demo the CPO used at Money20/20. The silent guardian framework — Mastercard invisible by default, visible only at the three moments that matter — is now adopted company-wide.
02Design Systems · Mastercard
Building a Scalable PartnerBank Design System for Global Product Demos and RFPs
Enterprise demos took days to customise per client. This system made it same-day — across global sales cycles.
03Commerce Infrastructure · Honasa
Multi-Brand Design System — Enabling Scalable D2C Growth at Honasa
One shared commerce backbone powering multiple D2C brands — without eroding brand identity.
040→1 Product · Dror
Building a Citizen Safety Platform from Scratch — and Pivoting It Under COVID
2 products shipped · ₹1.98Cr revenue · $494K raised
05Design Systems · Mastercard
Scaling Mastercard's Email System — From HTML Dependency to No-Code Infrastructure
Mastercard's brand evolved. Its email system hadn't. Rebuilt so any team could ship on-brand email — no HTML required.
Systems
Scalable foundations that bring consistency, flexibility, and better decision-making to product ecosystems.
How I approach systems, structure decisions, and design for scale under real-world constraints.
How I Think
Approach
How I think before I decide.
What's the forcing function?
What's actually making this problem urgent right now — and does that forcing function last?
What would have to be true for the opposite approach to be right?
The strongest test of any decision is whether you can honestly argue the other side.
Who isn't in the room whose constraints will break this later?
Engineering, legal, sales, the user in a low-connectivity environment. Find them before you commit.
Thinking
How I make product decisions under constraints.
Core Belief
Most product problems aren't solved by interfaces. They're solved by better decisions.
Incentives Drive Behavior
User behavior follows incentive structure, not stated intent. The most carefully designed interface fails when the mechanic beneath it rewards the wrong action. I map backwards from desired behavior: what does the system need to make true for users to act the way the product needs them to?
Designing Under Uncertainty
Most product decisions are made before the data exists to make them confidently. Waiting for certainty is itself a decision — often the wrong one. I use hypothesis-led framing: state what needs to be true, identify the fastest path to falsifying it, then design the experiment rather than the answer.
Balancing Growth & Risk
In regulated environments, compliance isn't a constraint on design — it's a design input. The most durable fintech products treat risk as part of the brief. Usability, compliance, and long-term stability aren't trade-offs to manage; they're system properties that need to be designed for simultaneously.
Thinking feeds into side projects — where ideas get tested outside of client constraints.
Building and Testing Ideas Outside of Work
Side Projects
Personal experiments built outside of work to test ideas around systems, behavior, and decision-making.
Insights
Writing on product, systems, and decision-making.
Building Scalable Typography for Modern Digital Products
Typography isn't decoration — it's the interface. A system of scale, rhythm, hierarchy, and restraint, with eight interactive tools: modular scale generator, pairing explorer, reading simulator, clamp() preview, and more.
Jun 2024Building a Scalable Color System for Modern Digital Products
A color system isn't a palette — it's a set of rules for when and why each color appears. Foundations, surfaces, semantics, and how to build an 11-stop scale from a single hue.
Jun 2024The Silent Guardian — What Agentic Commerce Taught Me About Trust as Architecture
When AI pays for you, where does Mastercard go? The wrong answer is everywhere. The right answer changed the company's direction.
Jun 2026Designing Incentive Systems
Most products fail due to misaligned incentives, not poor UX.
Jan 2025Personal projects that feed directly into how I think about systems and product decisions.
Driving Outcomes Beyond Product Design
Leadership
Cross-functional influence across product, engineering, sales, and research — from early demos to enterprise decisions.
Stakeholder Influence
Driving Enterprise Product Narratives
Pushed back on a VP-level brand decision in agentic commerce and got full alignment. The silent guardian framework — Mastercard invisible by default, appearing only at payment confirmation, verification, and completion — is now the adopted direction company-wide.
Agent Pay · Silent Guardian · Brand Strategy
Sales Enablement
Designing for Deal Velocity
Built the React + Claude AI demo the CPO used live at Money20/20, Connections, and Innovate at McLaren — in conversations with Google, ChatGPT, and merchant partners. No designer in the room required.
React · Claude AI · Money20/20
Research & Strategy
Turning Insights Into Direction
Led multilingual UX research across NAM, EU, and South America for agentic commerce trust signals — 6 flows, 2 typologies, real haptic feedback via Haptic Labs. Findings are confidential. Outcomes fed V2 direction.
UX Research · Haptic Labs · Agentic Commerce
Engineering Collaboration
Building Reusable Demo Systems
Built PartnerBank V1 entirely solo — 65 components, 120 screen templates. Proposed and led V2 rebuild after promotion, on new Figma multi-mode variable architecture, with a team of 3.
PartnerBank · Figma · Design Systems
Advisory
Trusted by startups and institutions to shape product direction and mentor designers.
Product Advisory
Mentorship
Beyond work and impact, here's more about how I think and what I focus on.
Who I am
A product designer who operates at the intersection of strategy, systems, and execution.
I've spent 7 years at the intersection of product and design — building systems that ship at Mastercard, leading a startup through a COVID pivot, pushing back on VP-level decisions and winning, and coding the React demo that Mastercard's CPO used at Money20/20.
I care about the problem more than the deliverable. That tends to show in the work.
Currently building toward product leadership — where design depth, business strategy, and systems thinking meet.
Outside of work, I spend time traveling, cooking, and going on long bike rides.
Focus areas
Exploring how AI reshapes product behavior
Designing systems that scale across products
Building trust in high-stakes environments
Making better decisions under constraints