AI is changing what users expect from the institutions they bank with. They expect a platform that recognizes them, offers guidance, and shows up in the moment something matters. Meeting that expectation takes more than adding an assistant on top of an existing app. It takes a platform built from the ground up to understand the person using it.
That belief shapes how Lumin approaches user experience. Good design starts with listening. Before building new capabilities, we worked to understand how users actually think about their financial lives, and that understanding drives everything from the structure of the platform to the intelligence taking shape on top of it.
A strategy built in layers
AI works only when everything beneath it is built to support it, so Lumin builds from the foundation up. The platform advances through four layers, and each one makes the next possible.
1
Foundation
is the everyday financial experience users rely on: balances, transactions, accounts, payments. Lumin’s platform ranks consistently among the top national brands in iSky Research’s digital banking benchmarks.
2
Adaptive
is how the platform learns from behavior, with navigation and surfaces that respond to how users actually move through the app.
3
Insight
is where Lumin’s AI intelligence layer changes what the platform can do. It moves from showing users what happened to guiding them on what to do next, in context and at the right moment. This layer is on the way.
4
Predictive
is the horizon: a platform that acts before users think to ask, with guidance delivered where they already are, even before they log in.
When all four layers work together, the platform becomes proactive, personal, and present wherever users are, inside the app and beyond it. That is Lumin Solaire: the intelligence layer Lumin builds on the foundation, growing more capable as the platform matures.
Built on evidence
The layered strategy rests on research rather than assumption. Across nine research methods and more than 1,300 participants, including interviews, card sorting, tree testing, and usability sessions, one signal held steady across institutions, regions, and age groups.
Users carry a mental model of how their financial life is organized: what belongs with what, and where they expect to find it. They engage when the platform matches that model, and they disengage when it asks them to work for it.
That insight is visible in the structure itself. When users were asked to group features, 87 percent placed Zelle and wires with transfers, and 80 percent placed loan payments with bill pay. The platform’s organization reflects how users think about their money because it was built around that thinking.
Flexibility, expressed in the navigation
Navigation is the largest and most visible expression of the strategy. Lumin redesigned it from the ground up, rethinking how everything is organized, surfaced, and found while keeping every capability in place.
The redesign gives institutions a choice. Lumin built two distinct navigation patterns for desktop and two for mobile, all on the same underlying structure, and the institution selects the one that fits each platform.
On desktop, that is a sidebar that keeps everything one click away and collapses when a user wants to focus, or a mega menu that puts the entire structure on the surface so users can orient before they commit to a click.
On mobile, it is a scrollable view for users who want to scan and go, or a bottom sheet that reveals each group with plain-language descriptions so users know what is inside before they tap. Lumin validates each pattern with real users, and across flows task success ranged from 72 to 92 percent.
No single pattern is the right one for everyone. Each meets the same standard for usability and scale, so the choice is genuine: an institution picks what fits its brand and its users without giving anything up. Behind all of them is a no-code admin tool for managing the navigation directly. Institutions add, edit, and reorganize items on their own, moving at the speed of their own strategy.
Designed to hold what comes next
The structure was built to carry the capabilities arriving on top of it. Specific locations are designed into the navigation today, ready for intelligence that activates over time as a deliberate design decision. Our design approach enables us to enhance existing experiences with Lumin Solaire AI features without disrupting or reconfiguring existing journeys.
Lumin Solaire-powered shortcuts sit at the top of each section. Today an institution configures them. Over time, Lumin Solaire reads how each user moves and surfaces the shortcuts that match, and users can pin what matters most to them, so the set becomes a blend of institutional intent, user behavior, and user preference.
A dedicated location for marketing and contextual content lets an institution meet users with the right message at the right moment, as part of the experience. And a data insights location is where Lumin Solaire Assist will live, offering guidance that helps users make better decisions with their money.
Navigation is one piece of a connected set of surfaces. Catch Up, notifications, account cards, mobile widgets, and account pages already do their jobs at a foundation level. The work ahead makes each of them meaningfully smarter and extends their reach beyond the app, so a balance, a nudge, or a timely alert can reach a user through a home screen widget or a push notification, without a login. The institution shows up in the moment that matters, where the user already is.
Priority over proliferation
A more capable platform has more to say. Left unmanaged, capability becomes noise, with every tip, alert, and recommendation competing for the same attention. The discipline that keeps intelligence useful is priority.
Lumin organizes what the platform surfaces in these locations throughout the experience into four tiers:
1
Critical alerts such as a system message or a payment due
2
Time-sensitive guidance such as an early paycheck or an account connection that needs attention
3
Insights from Lumin Solaire intelligence gathering and financial wellness tools
4
Promotional content such as featured actions and campaigns
Each tier carries the right weight and behaves differently. For a banking platform, that restraint is a safeguard, and it is how the intelligence stays trustworthy and valuable to your users as it grows.
Every tier is extensible. Your technology partners and development teams can build into the same hierarchy and locations, so extending the platform reinforces its structure.
Deepening the relationship
Engagement built this way compounds. A platform that understands users and grows more capable over time deepens the relationship between an institution and the people it serves, and that relationship compounds across retention, enterprise value, and the trust users place in the brand behind the experience.
Good design still starts with listening. The tools keep changing and so do user expectations, and the discipline of starting with the user holds through all of it. Lumin is building toward a platform that intelligently and automatically knows its users, with purpose and direction, and the institutions building alongside us are shaping what comes next.
Mike West
Vice President of User Experience, Lumin Digital
