I'm Nathan Bussiere, and I can help you make decisions grounded in real user needs.

An independent partner for your toughest user questions, with 20 years of fintech experience from startups to Visa.

You're making product decisions, but are they grounded in your users' actual needs?

You know user research matters, but hiring a full-time researcher feels premature, and you're not sure you're getting the answers you actually need from AI tools alone.

Maybe something feels off about the insights you're getting back. Or you're about to make a high-stakes product decision and you want someone with real expertise in your corner.

You need rigorous, impartial research, and a partner who can help you build the foundation to keep learning after the engagement ends.

Sound familiar? Let's talk

Invest in getting user research right

It starts with deep discovery. Foundational research that establishes who your users really are, what they need, and where your product is falling short or getting it right.

This is the work that AI tools can't shortcut: real conversations, careful observation, and the judgment that comes from years of experience in financial products. Methods are tailored to your situation and might include user interviews, diary studies, in-app surveys, usability testing, and behavioral analytics.

From there, I help you build the systems to keep learning on your own. That means setting up the tools, training, AI workflows, and experience metrics your team can use on an ongoing basis — so the insight doesn't stop when the engagement does.

The experience you need

I've spent more than 20 years doing user research in and around financial products — from Kasasa and community financial institutions at the beginning of my career, through nearly eight years leading research teams at Visa, to most recently serving as the sole researcher at Self Financial, a fintech startup where I built the research function from the ground up.

I know what it looks like to be the only researcher in a product organization. Building systems under pressure, making every study count, and translating findings into decisions that actually ship. At Self, I discovered that consumers needed more information than the team had planned for, which directly shaped the content strategy that led to a 38% conversion lift on a new cash advance product. When I work with your team, I bring that same instinct for what's essential and what can wait.

At Visa I partnered with product teams in payments innovation, cryptocurrency, enterprise tools, and developer experience — work that gave me a deep understanding of the regulatory, trust, and behavioral complexity that makes financial products uniquely challenging to research well. That experience also taught me how to build research systems that outlast any single engagement, which is exactly what I help smaller teams do today.

If your team is building in fintech — or anywhere trust and customer understanding are load-bearing — I'd love to talk nathan@bussiere.co.