FinTech
Information Architecture
Design Systems
White-label
Designing for Investors Who Expect More
The full investor experience on a digital-asset platform backed by J.P. Morgan, portfolio, invest flow, trading, transactions, and account management.
The problem
The investor app was built by engineers before design existed. Confusing structure, cramped side panels, hidden costs, and components that collapsed under real data.
What I did
Restructured the core IA (Assets → Portfolio), redesigned the asset panel around focus, made every cost transparent in the invest flow, and rebuilt the underlying components to scale, across data volumes and across bank brands.
The result
A production-ready investor experience that matches what high-net-worth users expect from a platform holding their money.
Role & Context
The moment
Picture the user: a private investor with serious net worth, evaluating digital-asset opportunities on a platform backed by J.P. Morgan. He opens “Assets”, and can’t tell what he actually owns. The tab mixed owned investments with potential opportunities, and the details he needs live in a narrow side panel with an endless scroll. Everything about his money is there; nothing about it feels like it respects his money.
Decision 01
Portfolio, not Assets
The word “Assets” was the root confusion: it meant “what I own” to users but contained opportunities too.
I split the model: Portfolio (what you own) and Trade (what’s in motion), and surfaced the two answers investors open the screen for, total balance on top, allocation in the center. Naming is architecture: one renamed tab removed the recurring “where are my assets?” confusion Customer Success kept hearing.
Decision 02
Fighting for focus, landing on a compromise
The side panel had a real-estate problem: critical financial context, balance, purchase history, buried under long scrolls.
Benchmarking leading investment platforms showed a consistent pattern: every asset gets a full screen with room to breathe, and people investing significant capital expect their asset to be treated like one. I pushed for a full-page asset view. It didn’t make the roadmap cut, prioritization went elsewhere, so I designed the compromise that kept the principle alive.
The compromise I accepted on purpose
An expandable panel, giving each asset the option of focus without rebuilding the navigation. Not the screen I fought for, but the user got most of the value, and the full-page direction stayed documented as the next step.
Decision 03
Components that scale, in two directions
The original components collapsed under real-world data volumes.
I built a Box component system, one flexible container for varied financial information, designed to hold scale instead of fighting it. And scale meant two things here: data volume, and brands, the app was designed as a white-label system that institutions could wrap in their own identity, demonstrated with example bank skins. Less invention, more discipline: a small system engineering could ship fast, and any bank could own.
Decision 04
No surprises with money
In the invest flow, I explored competing directions (A/B variants of the same steps) and landed on one principle: total cost transparency.
Fees and FX exposed upfront, before commitment, and a deterministic review step before anything final. For users investing serious capital, trust isn’t a brand value, it’s a UI decision: they should never meet a number for the first time after clicking.
What changed
From engineering build to production-ready product
The app went from an engineering build to a production-ready product: restructured IA, focused asset views, transparent costs, and full production coverage, empty states, loading skeletons, error and pending states, responsive down to mobile.
No formal metrics were set up; the honest evidence is the product reaching production and the “missing assets” confusion disappearing from Customer Success conversations.
Reflection
Next time, I’d define one signal upfront: how often users bounce between tabs before acting, so the improvement I could see in the product would be legible to everyone who wasn’t in the room.