Lightyear fintech help centre

Lightyear’s support team was answering the same questions again and again, so we built the place where customers could find the answer themselves. It had to read and feel like Lightyear, work on a phone first, and live in two places at once: on the website and inside the app itself.

The brief boiled down to a simple trade: every question a customer can settle on their own is time an agent gets back for the genuinely tricky cases. The hard part was making a large pile of support content feel easy to move through, rather than like a wiki nobody maintains.

This one was mine end to end: I owned the information architecture, the search-first front page, and the article and request-form UI, and set one visual system that held across web and app. I worked closely with the support team, whose ticket data pointed at what to build, and the engineers who shipped it.

I started from the questions people actually asked, then sorted the content into categories that match how customers think, not how the org chart is drawn. The same structure holds up on a laptop and a phone: search on top, and if you’d rather browse, no answer sits more than a couple of taps deep.

When people still need a human

And when someone genuinely needs a human, the request form takes screenshots and files, so the agent who picks it up already knows the story and can skip the “could you send us more details” round-trip.

Iteration and feedback

It never really stopped being designed. User tests, analytics and the support team’s own gripes kept feeding changes: better search results here, a clearer category name there. Small stuff, but the small stuff is what decides whether someone finds their answer or gives up and files a ticket.

The first cut of the structure mirrored Lightyear’s own teams, and testing showed people did not think in those terms, so I rebuilt the categories around the questions customers actually asked. I also chose not to document everything: a help centre that chases every edge case becomes the wiki nobody maintains, so I built for the handful of questions that drove most of the tickets and left an obvious path to a human for the rest.

The product has grown well past this help centre. CNBC covers Lightyear as Europe’s challenger to Robinhood, Richard Branson backed it early, and by 2025 the platform had closed a $23M Series B and passed $1 billion in customer assets across 25 European markets. The TechCrunch coverage of Lightyear tracks the story round by round, and the live product is at lightyear.com.

The research behind self-serve support design says the same thing this project did. Harvard Business Review found that 81% of customers try to solve the problem themselves before they ever contact a human. Nielsen Norman Group’s guidance on help and documentation covers why a fintech help centre has to be scannable rather than complete. And Zendesk’s work on self-service and ticket deflection puts numbers on what a good knowledge base saves a support team. None of this was news to the agents; it was nice to watch the tickets agree.