004 · 2025
Plin: Peru's digital wallet
Plin is the free, instant way Peruvians send and receive soles with a phone number or a QR, across banks, from inside the app they already use. At Scotiabank I worked on the experience that makes that feel obvious: affiliate once, find a person, confirm the money moved, without teaching anyone a new product.
- Role
- Design · Scotiabank · Plin in the mobile app (flows, UI, handoff with channels)
- Status
- Shipped to production · live
Screens
Recargar transporte, end to end
The Metropolitano recharge flow as designed: from explaining the wait to activate balance, through amount and confirmation, to the receipt — built here as interactive-scale prototypes, not screenshots.
What Plin has to be
Cash and card are still default for a lot of everyday spending in Peru, but P2P through a wallet had already trained people to expect free, instant transfers with nothing but a phone number. Plin is that promise across banks: affiliate your number to a soles account once, then send or charge with a contact, a number, or a QR. It lives inside each bank's app, not as a separate download, which means the design has to feel like a Scotiabank feature and like the same Plin people already know from friends on other banks.
Decision
Phone first, account detail never
The whole point of Plin is that you never type a CCI or account number for a friend. Destinations are a number you already have, a contact that resolved to an affiliated user, or a QR you scan. That sounds simple until error states show up: numbers that aren't affiliated, people with several banks (pick which Plin destination), Yape and other networks in the interoperability map, and daily / per-operation limits that have to be clear before someone commits, not after a decline. The UI treats those as first-class states, not edge cases.
Decision
Trust is the confirmation screen
Sending money to a phone number has one fear that dwarfs the rest: wrong person. The confirm step is where trust is won or lost: who receives, which bank, how much, and that it's free and immediate. We kept that screen calm and readable, with the recipient identity as the primary signal, limits and fees (or the absence of them) in plain language, and a hard stop before the debit. QR pay and QR charge had to rhyme with that same confirmation grammar so scanning a merchant didn't invent a second mental model.
How it's built
Inside the bank app, not a brochure
Plin isn't a marketing page you hand off once. I designed and refined the in-app flows against real constraints: affiliation, send, receive, show-my-QR, scan-to-pay, and the states when interoperability routes to another network. Work sat with channels and product so what left Figma matched what the app could ship: copy in Peruvian Spanish, accessibility on small screens, and the same quiet patterns we used elsewhere in Scotiabank's digital channels so Plin didn't look bolted on.
How it's built
Recargar transporte, designed end to end
One of the heavier Plin surfaces is topping up a Metropolitano card from the Scotiabank app: explain the five-to-ten minute activation wait before anyone commits money, capture the card number, pick a preset amount, confirm which account pays, and land on a receipt that is shareable. The prototypes below rebuild that walkthrough in code — the Work index only scatters the three primary beats (how it works, amount, constancia).
Honest outcome
Plin shipped in the Scotiabank app and is live for customers today, including the broader interoperability people now expect with Yape and other entities. Adoption and volume numbers belong to the bank, so I'm not publishing them here. What I can defend is the design stance: phone or QR instead of bank details, confirmation as the trust surface, and one mental model whether you're paying a friend or a merchant.