The contemporary financial environment is rapidly evolving, and the expansion of global payment services and the emergence of digital currencies are demanding fundamental changes in UX within financial services. The monetary system has continually tra...
The contemporary financial environment is rapidly evolving, and the expansion of global payment services and the emergence of digital currencies are demanding fundamental changes in UX within financial services. The monetary system has continually transformed, evolving from the gold standard to a dollar-centered international monetary system and, more recently, to the emergence of virtual assets. These transformations have significantly reshaped the way individuals interact with financial services. In the future, global payment services are expected to develop as transnational platforms that are no longer confined to a specific country or region, but are simultaneously accessed and used by users with diverse cultural backgrounds.
A review of previous studies on financial UX reveals that Korea has emphasized speed and convenience, Japan has prioritized stability and security, China has focused on integration through super-app ecosystems, and the United States has sought a balance between credit-based systems and user autonomy. However, most existing research has approached financial services from an individual national perspective, which limits a comprehensive understanding of how cultural differences influence the same financial behavior particularly the experience of cross-border money transfers in a globally connected financial environment. In the process of overseas remittance, where complex factors such as exchange rates, fees, security authentication, and procedural steps are intertwined, users’ perceptions and acceptance of these processes differ according to each culture’s values, uncertainty avoidance tendencies, perception of time, and methods of trust formation. Even when the functions remain identical, they may be perceived as efficient in one cultural context while being interpreted as inconvenient or risky in another. This highlights a critical challenge in designing effective global financial UX solely through functional improvements.
Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to analyze how cultural differences among users in Korea, Japan, China, and the United States influence the same financial behavior of overseas remittance, and to explore whether it is possible to design a localized UX that reflects the unique characteristics of each country. To achieve this, the study establishes the following research questions:
RQ1: How do national cultural differences influence the user experience of overseas remittance processes?
RQ2: How do perceived pain points in overseas remittance differ across countries?
RQ3: Is it possible to reduce process steps and improve experiential efficiency by redesigning the overseas remittance process to reflect cultural and experiential differences?
Based on a comparative cultural analysis of the four countries, an examination of existing financial services and remittance processes, and the extraction of user experience based insights, this study proposes a structural model for an integrated digital currency management service. Subsequently, a prototype was designed and evaluated through user testing in order to analyze perceptual and experiential changes across cultural contexts and to verify the effectiveness of the proposed design model. The results of this study indicate that RQ1 has a significant impact on the overseas remittance user experience. Even when the remittance function is identical, users from different cultural backgrounds showed different priorities in the information they considered important and different expectations regarding the remittance process. Regarding RQ2, the analysis revealed that users in Korea and the United States perceived information complexity in fee and exchange rate comparisons as a major pain point, while users in Japan experienced discomfort due to insufficient procedural explanations and confirmation steps. In contrast, users in China reported pain points when remittance speed was slow or when the level of automation was low.
Finally, the results related to RQ3 confirmed that it is possible to reduce unnecessary steps while maintaining or even enhancing user trust in the remittance process.
By systematically examining how cultural differences affect user experience in the specific financial behavior of overseas remittance and by proposing a localized UX design strategy based on these findings, this study seeks to present a direction for designing integrated financial services that account for cultural diversity in the emerging digital currency environment. The results of this research offer both academic and practical implications, and may serve as a meaningful design guideline for future cross-national financial service UX design and the development of global fintech platforms.