Eight onboarding systems, one lifecycle surface.
Client onboarding and lifecycle workflows for the Sales, Client Service, Compliance, Credit, Legal, and Operations teams that move an institutional client from first request to ready-to-trade. Built for onboarding visibility, workflow coordination, and clear task ownership.
The workflow ran on email and one spreadsheet.
Onboarding worked on paper. In practice, requests went quiet in the gaps between teams, and no one owned the middle.
- Multiple disconnected onboarding workflows across teams
- Limited visibility into onboarding status and progress
- Ownership gaps in the hand-offs between teams
- Manual tracking through email threads and spreadsheets
- Delays caused by downstream approval dependencies
- Blockers and pending approvals that were hard to see
The teams behind a single onboarding.
A request passes through many teams before a client can trade. Each owns a different part of the lifecycle and needs a different view of the same record.
Three weeks of research before a single screen.
The lifecycle model is the foundation the product sits on. It came from mapping the real workflow, not from sketching.
One lifecycle, four stages, many owners.
Sales starts a request, Client Service coordinates it, downstream workflows run in parallel, and the client is cleared to trade.
More than wireframes. I owned the workflow.
Embedded design lead from discovery through rollout, accountable for the model the product was built on and the alignment that made it possible.
Stakeholder facilitation
Ran alignment sessions across Sales, Operations, KYC, Credit, Legal, and Compliance, bringing structured tradeoffs rather than open-ended workshops.
Workflow architecture
Mapped the eight-system chain, found where work actually queued, and proposed the consolidated lifecycle model the product sits on.
Design system contributions
Designed the dashboard, intake, and role-based views inside the bank's design system, adding new patterns where the system had none.
UAT & rollout
Led UAT planning with BAs, joined operations training, and stayed in the room post-launch to drive incremental, team-by-team adoption.
The same record looks different to each team.
Tap a role to see what they need, and what the surface gives them.
Initiate without translating.
- Fast intake with minimal required fields
- Request status in plain language
- Clear ownership of what is still owed from sales
- No exposure to downstream system mechanics
One surface, every request.
- Real-time view of every onboarding in flight
- Filter by team, risk, and time-in-stage
- Product onboarding state at line-item granularity
- Deliberate hand-off control into Ready to Trade
Review the record, not a report.
- Regulatory and risk validation workflows
- Structured access to entity data and disclosures
- Audit-ready trail of every state change
- A surface for follow-up requests back to sales
Defensible by default.
- Every state change logged automatically
- Compliance-ready without quarterly exports
- Portfolio view across all in-flight onboardings
- Queryable from the surface itself
The choices I would defend in any review.
Tap to open the reasoning and the tradeoff behind each one.
01
Minimal sales input at intake
~40% fewer mandatory fields at intake
+
Minimal sales input at intake
- Problem
- Intake required data Sales did not have and Operations did not need yet. A missing field blocked the request entirely.
- Decision
- Strip intake to the genuine minimum and use progressive disclosure to defer every other field to the stage that needs it.
02
Lifecycle status in plain language
One model across eight vocabularies
+
Lifecycle status in plain language
- Problem
- The same onboarding read as "in review," "pending docs," and "blocked" across different systems. Sales could not translate.
- Decision
- Six plain-language stages, with the full system trace one click away for ops and compliance.
03
Role-based views over one shared model
12+ teams, one lifecycle underneath
+
Role-based views over one shared model
- Problem
- Each operations sub-team had its own definition of "this onboarding is mine."
- Decision
- Role-aware default views and saved queries, all over a single shared data model.
04
Audit trail as a first-class object
Audit prep cut from weeks to minutes
+
Audit trail as a first-class object
- Problem
- Audit was a quarterly export. By the time something needed defending, the trail was gone.
- Decision
- Capture every state change against the record itself, queryable from where the work happens.
The conditions the design had to live inside.
A Capital Markets onboarding platform does not ship into a vacuum. These constraints shaped what was possible.
Regulatory and compliance requirements
Every state change had to be defensible to internal and external auditors.
Multiple downstream systems
KYC, credit, account setup, and trading platforms could be coordinated, not replaced.
Role-based permissions
Each team needed access scoped to its mandate across a shared record.
Operational dependencies across teams
No single team could mandate a workflow change on its own.
Existing platform limitations
The design had to work within the bank's enterprise design system and stack.
Auditability and traceability
The lifecycle had to produce an audit trail as a by-product of the work itself.
How the decisions show up in the product.
Recreated views with client data and branding removed. Each one answers a specific operational problem.
What changed.
Teams stopped maintaining their parallel spreadsheets. The clearest signal the product is doing its job.
Compliance reviews the record, not a report. Audit prep dropped from weeks to opening the activity trail.
Sales stopped emailing to ask "where is this." Status lives on the surface they already use.
The lifecycle became the shared vocabulary. Meetings stopped relitigating what "in review" means.
What I'd do again, and what I wouldn't.
Spend the first three weeks not designing.
The lifecycle model could not have come from sketching. It came from mapping the real workflow and watching the old work happen.
Treat instrumentation as a launch blocker.
Some numbers are directional because telemetry came after launch. Next time, measurement ships with the product.