The problem
Payments to investors went out directly from the company's account, with no standardization and very little automation. When something went wrong — and things went wrong often — the finance team fixed it by hand.
As the investor base scaled, those manual fixes became unsustainable. A meaningful portion of payments weren't completing. Reconciliation was slow. The financial risk was growing every month, with no reliable way to get ahead of it.
Approach
I started with the operational process, not the interface. I mapped every step of how payments were actually being made — where decisions happened, where errors occurred, and where manual work was covering for systemic failures.
The diagnosis shaped the strategy. Some problems could be fixed with better process design. Others needed a technology solution. I helped evaluate a new banking partner, then worked closely with engineering through the payment API integration.
With the infrastructure in place, I designed the new payment module — focused on reliability, control, and operational visibility. The interface gave the finance team a level of clarity and confidence they hadn't had before.
Payment architecture
Financial module
Reconciliation flow
Outcome
Payment processing time dropped by 95%. 98% of transactions went through without errors. CSAT reached 85%, with a CEST of 5.10 — measured in the first six months after launch.
Manual processes were nearly eliminated. The finance team went from constantly firefighting to operating with predictability.
This project changed how I think about product design. The real work wasn't in the screens — it was in understanding a broken operational system well enough to help rebuild it. That's when I started thinking of myself as something between a designer and a product manager.
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