How Nubank’s design system delivered accessible and localized experiences with Figma

Summary:

Nubank, one of Latin America’s largest digital banks, has built its reputation around challenging the norms of financial services. For over a decade, its goal has remained clear: empower people by making financial services simple, transparent, and human.

Serving over 118 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, Nubank turned to Figma to help maintain design consistency and scale its operations across markets. By building its design system, NuDS, entirely in Figma, Nubank has delivered more accessible, localized experiences through tokens and theming.

Challenge: Designing with speed, scale, and regional depth

As Nubank expanded across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, its design operations became increasingly complex, with each market bringing distinct regulatory requirements, cultural contexts, and user expectations.

Design remained a strategic pillar, but maintaining quality and cohesion at scale became harder. “We didn’t want to be just another bank with slightly better UX. Our promise is to build products that are fundamentally different,” says Ellen Kiss, Director and Design Expertise Lead at Nubank.

Before Figma, the team worked with a mix of other two different platforms . This fragmented setup made version control difficult, collaboration inconsistent, and cross-team alignment nearly impossible, especially for a financial institution navigating strict regulatory requirements across different markets.

To keep pace with growth and to honor its mission in making finance more human, Nubank knew it needed a platform that could unify its tools, its people, and its design standards across every market it served.

Solution: Building a design infrastructure for excellence and scale

Figma gave Nubank’s 200+ designers a shared, real-time workspace across three countries. Content designers, researchers, engineers, and PMs could co-create in one environment, bringing more agility to their work.

Localization quickly became a competitive advantage. With designers embedded in each market, the team was able to shape experiences that felt local by design, from how a message was worded to how products were visually structured.

One Colombian designer, who was also a Nubank customer, told Ellen, “It feels like this app is speaking to me.” That kind of personal and intentional connection is what continues to set the company apart in an industry that often feels cold, rigid, and impersonal.

NuDS: 80% adoption and a new theme shipped in just one sprint

Nubank’s design system, NuDS, serves as the foundation for delivering consistent, accessible experiences across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. Built entirely in Figma, NuDS started as a minimalist library but has grown into a flexible, multi-market framework that now powers everything from daily product updates to full-scale regional rollouts.

Designed to reflect Nubank’s clean, accessible aesthetic, NuDS supports over 100 reusable components and screen templates. These include localized patterns like vertical credit cards for Brazil and horizontal versions for Mexico and Colombia. With Figma’s variables and modes, teams can also manage multilingual content in a single file, easily toggling between Portuguese, Spanish, and English without duplicating design work.

As the company expanded, so did the design system’s footprint. Today, NuDS supports around 320,000 lines of code on Figma from all components across various software versions, demonstrating its reach and depth within Nubank’s engineering and design ecosystems.

To support adoption at scale, the team developed a Figma-native plugin that checks designs for NuDS compliance. “The goal of the plugin is to give designers a contextual way to check how much of their flow is using NuDS. It helps them catch deprecated components or missing links early, before anything gets handed off to engineering,” says Zé Zorzan, Senior Product Designer at Nubank.

“By surfacing issues directly in Figma, we’re making sure design system adoption happens upstream, not after the fact,” Zé adds.

Accessibility is also built into the foundation of NuDS. Every component is designed to support screen readers, responsive text resizing, and color contrast standards. “Accessibility is something we think about from the start. It’s in the default behaviors, not something you layer on later,” says Zé.

This commitment to accessibility was central in the recent rollout of Nubank’s updated brand color for the business accounts segment. The NuDS team collaborated closely with teams in Brazil and across branding to ensure the new palette met accessibility standards and worked across all surfaces.

Thanks to NuDS’s foundations—tokens, theming, and governance tooling—the updated theme was implemented in just one sprint. Illustrations were refreshed, visual elements adjusted, and the system was able to adapt quickly without disrupting delivery.

Standardizing changes like these through NuDS unlocks speed and flexibility at scale. Over the past five years, NuDS has contributed savings across design and engineering.

Adoption has grown steadily alongside its impact. NuDS is now deeply integrated into Nubank’s design and engineering stack. Built on a server-driven UI architecture, 80% of app screens use this approach—most of them powered by NuDS Foundations, the latest version of the system that standardizes tokens, themes, modes, and analytics. A recent audit showed that 80% of product screens are fully NuDS-compliant. Internally, satisfaction is also rising, evidenced by NuDS’s NPS (Net Promoter Score) doubling in one year.

With NuDS deeply integrated into every stage of the product development lifecycle, Nubank continues to scale design quality with speed, ensuring that every product is not only consistent and accessible but also built to adapt.

Designing with confidence and control with Figma Enterprise

In 2024, Nubank upgraded to Figma Enterprise to strengthen two critical areas: security and design governance. As a financial institution working under strict compliance standards, the team needed more advanced controls over how files were accessed and managed across a growing, distributed design organization.

One of the biggest shifts was the ability to implement structured, role-based access using Okta integration—a feature available through Figma Enterprise. This allowed Nubank to align design access with company-wide identity and security protocols, ensuring that only authorized team members could access sensitive projects and prototypes.

While Figma already enabled broad collaboration through view and comment permissions, the Enterprise plan gave Nubank stronger administrative control. Teams could now manage users at scale, assign roles more precisely, and restrict file actions across departments, all while keeping the design environment flexible and easy to navigate.

With hundreds of active files in motion at any given time, governance also became more manageable. Teams introduced standardized Figma file cover formats to make projects easier to navigate, even without specific file naming conventions.

This organizational clarity enabled broader strategic initiatives, like the rollout of Nubank’s Product Screen Template.

After auditing dozens of screens across products and markets, the design system team created a flexible framework that incorporates product overviews, localized content, compliance copy, and UI patterns—all governed by the NuDS design system.

With Figma Enterprise providing the structure and access controls to support this rollout, the template is expected to help teams across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia design faster, more consistently, and with higher quality.

A system’s built for what’s next

As the team continues to refine its workflows, it’s also looking to streamline prototyping and user testing with Figma Make, an AI-powered design tool. For years, the design team at Nubank relied on a mix of external tools to simulate interactions, test features, and validate ideas with users. But none of them quite fit.

With Figma Make now available in beta, the team sees an opportunity to consolidate more of its workflow inside a single, integrated platform. “We’ve tried so many tools for prototyping, and none of them quite fit. If Figma Make works the way we hope, it could change how we research and validate our ideas,” says Ellen.

Together, these efforts reflect a broader philosophy at Nubank: build great products, adapt often, and intentionally invest in tools equipped for what comes next.