A Nigerian-born product designer working across U.S. and global institutions has helped unlock nearly $2 billion in student loan savings by reworking how borrowers access existing programmes, pointing to a broader shift in design from interface aesthetics to core financial infrastructure.

In an interview with Business Insider Africa, Lanre Fadire said his work centres on simplifying complex systems rather than building new products, enabling users to tap into benefits that already exist but are often obscured by bureaucracy.

His most measurable impact has come through his work at Summer PBC, a platform designed to help borrowers navigate the U.S. student loan system.

Fadire, who secured a 2024 ALPSP Innovation Award finalist spot, said the scale of the problem is often underestimated.

“The number's actually around to $1.9 billion now, but to understand what that means, you need context on the student loan landscape in the U.S. There’s roughly $1.8 trillion in outstanding student loan debt across 43 million borrowers. It’s the second-largest category of consumer debt after mortgages,” he said.

That burden reflects the structural weight of student debt in the U.S. economy. Data from the Federal Reserve shows it has become one of the largest categories of household liabilities, with repayment outcomes often shaped by programme selection and administrative complexity.

The system itself is highly fragmented, combining federal and private loans, multiple repayment plans, and overlapping forgiveness programmes administered across different servicers.

As a result, access to relief is often less about eligibility and more about navigation.

“There are at least 4 different Income-Driven Repayment plans, over 140 forgiveness programs, constant policy changes, and eligibility rules that shift based on your employer, income, and loan type,” Fadire said. “Most people have no idea what they qualify for.”

In practice, that complexity has limited uptake of relief programmes, with many borrowers missing out on benefits due to gaps in awareness and enrollment.

“That’s where Summer comes in,” he said. “Our job is to make sure users are aware of every opportunity and pathway available to them, while ensuring that complexity and bureaucracy don’t show up in the platform.”

His work focused on simplifying how users interact with key programmes such as Income-Driven Repayment and Public Service Loan Forgiveness, while expanding access to employer-backed benefits.

“The platform already had a strong foundation for the two largest programs when I joined,” he said. “Income-Driven Repayment helps people pay based on what they can actually afford, while Public Service Loan Forgiveness maps out the optimal strategy over 10 years.”

He said the focus was on reducing friction across the user journey.

“My work involved refining flows, improving clarity where users got stuck, and building design systems so the team could ship faster without design becoming a bottleneck.”

He also introduced tools to broaden how borrowers manage debt beyond traditional repayment pathways.

“I also designed new tools that tackle debt from different angles. The Employer Loan Contribution feature helps users access benefits where employers pay down their loans, while Tuition Assistance connects people to programmes that cover education costs upfront. These aren’t as high-dollar as IDR or PSLF, but they add up.”

Taken together, the changes translated into measurable outcomes by improving access to existing systems rather than creating new ones.

“That $2 billion in savings represents people who didn’t have to navigate the bureaucracy alone,” he said. “It’s not that design created those savings. The policies and programs created that potential. Design made it possible for people to actually access it.”

That approach traces back to his early career in Nigeria, where he worked across sectors, moving between enterprise systems, consumer applications and public platforms.

“It started at SBSC, a software consulting agency in Nigeria. We’d switch between project contexts constantly,” he said. “You’d be designing a CRM system for a bank one week, then a consumer app the next.”

The experience highlighted a consistent pattern: system performance, not visual appeal, determined success.

“Most clients would ask ‘ensure it looks good, or make it pop’ first,” he said. “But that wasn’t what made projects succeed or fail. The successful ones were the ones users could move through with minimal bottlenecks.”

Poorly designed systems, he added, often disrupted operations regardless of how polished they appeared.

“A confusing procurement system meant operations stopped. A CRM with unclear workflows meant sales teams went back to spreadsheets,” he said.

“That’s when I started thinking about design as infrastructure. Good infrastructure is invisible. People remember when things don’t work.”

That perspective informed his work at Summer PBC, where he redesigned onboarding systems for a large municipal workforce, exposing gaps in how digital platforms serve non-traditional users.

“Many municipal employees don’t have a work email. They’re eligible for benefits, but traditional systems assume otherwise,” he said.

To address this, his team introduced alternative verification pathways.

“We built multiple verification pathways. Email for those who have it, alternatives for those who don’t. We needed systems that didn’t lock them out,” he said.

“What was broken was assuming one method works for everyone. What we fixed was designing for the actual workforce.”

AI and the growing risk to research integrity

Beyond finance, Fadire has also worked on research integrity tools at Morressier, where artificial intelligence is reshaping how academic content is produced and verified.

“Research integrity is at a critical stage right now, and AI is making the problem both harder and easier,” he said.

“The pressure to publish has created an explosion in research misconduct. Paper mills are using AI to mass-produce fraudulent papers.”

Rather than focusing solely on detection, his work shifted towards improving investigation workflows.

“The market gap wasn’t better detection. It was that investigations took too long and required jumping between multiple systems,” he said.

“We built a platform that brought different checks into one place, but the key was designing it around investigation, not just detection.”

In high-risk systems, he said, design must prioritise transparency and human oversight.

“When our platform flags potential misconduct, that decision could derail a career or let fraudulent research into the scientific record,” he said.

“We moved away from showing verdicts and focused on showing evidence. Decisions require confirmation steps. No bulk actions.”

“In high-stakes systems, trust comes from showing your reasoning, making decisions reversible, and forcing human review.”

Looking ahead, Fadire identified digital accessibility as an emerging area of opportunity, particularly as AI accelerates software development.

“Accessibility compliance. WCAG 2.2 AA specifically,” he said.

“95% of websites fail basic WCAG standards today. AI tools let anyone build software fast, but they don’t generate accessible code by default.”

With regulatory pressure increasing globally, he sees a widening gap between software creation and compliance.

“This is a design problem, not just a technical one,” he said. “Automated testing only catches a fraction of accessibility issues.”

As digital systems expand across finance, public services and research, Fadire’s work shows a broader shift: designers now focus less on aesthetics and more on how systems function, enable access and deliver real-world outcomes. (Business Insider Africa)