You Don't Remember Your Last Payment — The Art of Invisible CX

Think about your last payment. The screen, the colours, how it felt. Chances are you remember almost nothing — and that's exactly the point. In this episode of The CX Algorithm, we unpack the art of invisible customer experience design: how the best payment experiences succeed by disappearing, and why trust — not speed — is the real product.

Host Dr Eslam Afifi sits down with Alexei Krasnov, a customer experience and product design leader in payments across Asia Pacific, for a practitioner's look at designing what people never consciously notice — engineering trust, calibrating friction, and building experiences for a customer who is increasingly not even in the room, because an AI agent is transacting on their behalf.

In this conversation:

• Why "frictionless" is a myth — and when friction is actually good design
• How to research behaviour people can't put into words: trust what users do, not what they say
• Why the payment is table stakes — and where the real value lives beyond the tap
• Designing for your customer's customer in a B2B2C world
• What Asia Pacific's fragmented, leapfrogging markets teach every CX leader
• Agentic commerce and AI payments: consent, control, and "did I do that — or did my agent?"

Whether you work in customer experience, product design, UX, fintech, payments, or financial services — or you're just curious how the invisible systems around you are built — this episode will change how you see every tap, swipe, and checkout.

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Guest — Alexei Krasnov

Alexei Krasnov is Director of Product Experience Design at Mastercard, leading CX and design innovation for payments across Asia Pacific. His work shapes the invisible systems billions of people use every day without noticing. With over two decades across the US, Europe and Asia Pacific, he specialises in one of CX's hardest problems: designing for what people are never meant to think about.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akrasnov/

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Host — Dr Eslam Afifi

Dr Eslam Afifi is the host of The CX Algorithm and a customer experience, data and insights leader who treats CX as a system to be deliberately engineered — built on the right balance of people, process, technology and data. With a PhD in Human-Centered Design & AI and an EMBA from IE University, he brings a practitioner's, anti-hype lens to every episode: less magic, more method.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eslam-afifi/