Problem Statement:
Modernizing Enterprise Liquidity Management
The Market Gap:
Large corporations and Multi-Legal Entities (MLEs) are increasingly outgrowing the rigid infrastructures of Canada’s primary financial institutions. While these organizations manage high-velocity, cross-border transactions daily, legacy platforms often lack the automation and user experience sophistication found in modern fintech challengers.
The Strategic Pivot
As digital currencies and real-time payment rails become the industry standard, corporate banking must move beyond simple ledger management. Currently, corporations are migrating to third-party tools to solve for three critical needs:
Operational Friction:
Reducing the manual overhead of high-volume foreign exchange transactions.
Fragmented Visibility:
Consolidating financial data across multiple international sub-entities.
Interoperability:
Integrating seamlessly with digital assets and modern payment protocols.
The Objective
To capture market share and expand our enterprise footprint, we must evolve the corporate banking experience from a cumbersome necessity into a strategic advantage. By prioritizing automation and high-efficiency workflows, we can provide a value proposition that rivals third-party software while maintaining the security of a Tier 1 financial institution.
Executive Summary
The legacy infrastructure was built for low-volume, ad-hoc transactions, creating a high-friction bottleneck for enterprise-scale payroll and recurring settlements. By forcing a single-entry model without batch automation or templating, the system introduced significant operational risk and human error. This lack of scalability was the primary driver of churn, as large-scale entities migrated to automated third-party challengers to solve for efficiency and governance.
Target Users
Strategic User Segmentation and Scaling
The Core Objective: Protecting Feature Parity
The decision to focus on mid-market and enterprise segments was driven by a need to preserve the high-utility single payment functionality currently used by our core base. This ensured that as we scaled for complexity, we did not degrade the efficiency of foundational workflows.
Mid-Market: Bridging the Operational Gap
Mid-market entities represent a hybrid use case. They require the agility of small-business tools for daily ad-hoc transfers, but they also demand the industrial-strength capabilities of enterprise systems.
Hybrid Workflows:
Seamlessly switching between individual manual payments and bulk file-based processing.
Operational Scale:
Supporting high-frequency payroll and B2B transactions across multiple business units.
Enterprise: Designing for High-Velocity Complexity
Expanding into the large corporate segment required a fundamental shift in how we handle transaction density and risk mitigation.
High-Volume Payment Type Diversity:
Managing a constant stream of international FX, Direct Deposit (ACH), and real-time payment rails.
Governance and Risk:
Architecting for elevated approval limits and multi-step authorization workflows.
Payee Management:
Optimizing for massive databases where search and filtering are more critical than simple selection.
Strategy and Decision Logic
Technical Governance & Systems Architecture
As a designer, the challenge wasn't just "can we build it," but "how does this integrate into a high-stakes ecosystem without compromising stability." If we launched a product that was causing high-risk payments to not be processed, it could cause legal issues for the bank.
Data Density vs. Performance:
High-volume MLE accounts require architecting for asynchronous loading states and pagination logic to handle thousands of payees without degrading the experience.
Granular Permission Modeling:
Designing a flexible system that supports the complex "Doer-Checker" (Maker-Checker) workflows, ensuring that security permissions (Doer, Approver, Self-Approver) are hard-coded into the UI logic.
System Resilience:
Collaborating with engineering to align the frontend with a microservices architecture, ensuring that a failure in one payment rail (e.g., FX) doesn't take down the entire transfers module.
Business Logic & Market Positioning
These constraints represent the "North Star" for the project—balancing immediate needs with long-term competitive advantage.
The "Build vs. Buy" Pressure:
Addressing the threat of third-party platforms (QuickBooks, international challengers) by identifying the most critical MVP features that provide a higher "return on experience" than legacy systems.
Regulatory & Liquidity Rails:
Operating within the fixed limits of Canadian and international banking protocols, including ACH, Wire, and Interac, where processing times and approval caps are non-negotiable business rules.
Resource Optimization:
Strategizing the design roadmap to deliver a high-impact MVP within tight budget and headcount allocations, requiring ruthless prioritization of "needs" over "wants."
User Adoption & Cognitive Friction
At this level, the constraint isn't just "the user," it’s the "change management" required to move them from old habits to new systems.
The Learning Curve:
Recognizing that for corporate treasurers, "new" often means "risky." The design had to minimize cognitive load during the transition to prevent operational downtime.
Contextual Mobility:
Ensuring that high-value approval workflows are truly "mobile-first," allowing executives to authorize multi-million dollar transfers securely while on the go.
Safety & Irreversibility:
Designing friction into the right places—creating clear confirmation states for irreversible operations (like file uploads) to mitigate the risk of irreversible user error.
Collaboration
LPL Staff Designers
Aligning with staff designers to understand what components and existing patterns would be useful, easy for developers to include, and commonly used by users experienced with the platform
Content Designer
Developing a new content strategy that would be more scannable to aid in comparing payment methods, and hiding secondary content in tooltips to avoid clutter the UI on mobile screens
UX Researcher
Conducting user testing on the latest version of the 'Make a Single Payment' flow to gather feedback. Categorizing changes that are "easy wins" vs. changes involving lots of discussions with product partners, developers and stakeholders.
Research
Market Competitor Analysis
The initial audit revealed that ABC Financial lagged behind industry standards in core enterprise functionality. I conducted a comprehensive competitive analysis across Tier 1 banks and fintech challengers to identify the specific feature gaps preventing us from capturing the mid-market and enterprise segments.
Strategic Objectives
The goal of this benchmarking exercise was to move beyond feature parity and identify opportunities for market differentiation:
Industry Standards & Trends:
Mapping the shift toward real-time payment rails and autonomous finance.
Gap Analysis:
Identifying high-friction patterns in ABC’s existing infrastructure that drove users toward third-party platforms.
Experience Benchmarking:
Measuring our current transaction workflows against top-tier competitors to establish a baseline for MVP success.
Strategic Differentiation:
Defining unique value propositions that would position ABC Financial as a leader in corporate liquidity management.
User Journey Mapping:
Measuring our current transaction workflows against top-tier competitors to establish a baseline for MVP success.
Primary and Secondary Research
To define the product requirements for the enterprise payment suite, I led a dual-track research initiative. My goal was to compare qualitative friction points with quantitative market benchmarks to de-risk our development of the high-velocity payment engine.
Primary Research: Identifying Operational Friction
I synthesized internal feedback loops to map the current state of our business banking ecosystem. This allowed us to identify "silent" pain points that were driving support volume and user churn.
Voice of the Customer (VoC):
Analyzed high-frequency support tickets and daily customer service logs to pinpoint systemic workflow failures.
Cross-Platform Audits:
Evaluated feedback from existing small and medium enterprise (SME) users. While our target shifted toward larger corporations, understanding the baseline functionality gaps for SMEs allowed us to build a more robust, scalable foundation for all business tiers.
Secondary Research: Competitive Benchmarking
Using iSky Research, I conducted a deep-dive analysis of global and domestic competitors to benchmark our bulk payment maturity.
Feature Parity Mapping:
Audited the bulk payment and automated clearing house (ACH) capabilities of Tier 1 financial institutions
Trend Forecasting:
Identified the shift toward autonomous finance and real-time payment rails to ensure our MVP was not just competitive today, but future-proofed for the next five years.
Strategic Gaps:
Pinpointed exactly where ABC Financial fell behind market leaders, allowing us to prioritize high-value features like payment templating and batch automation.
Secondary Research Highlights
Payment templates
25% of clients save ACH templates to process recurring payments (payroll, bill payments) vs. manual entry
Foreign currency offering
Large corporation use wire payments to process currencies other than USD and CAD
Uploading payment files
Clients use accounting softwares to produce bulk payment files
Approving single payments
Sometimes individual payment approvals and statuses are required for bulk payments
Manual entry vs. automation
Clients risk inputting incorrect payment details vs. pre-filling saved data
Interview Insight Themes
After synthesizing our primary and secondary research, we categorized them into motivations, pain points and behaviours.
Motivation: TIME
Able to process payments quickly with the use of uploading bulk payment files, adding single payments, and prefilling payee details
Behaviour: DETAIL DRIVEN
A lot of the users that would use this payment order feature work with large spreadsheets on a daily basis. They're used to viewing large data sets and reviewing transaction history on large screens
Pain Points: SCANNABILITY
When reviewing payment details before and after submitting payments, users preferred seeing everything in a table format vs. individual cards
Pain Points: SECURITY
Having specific permissions per user to limit the visibility of certain accounts, transactions, and user actions (edit, delete, add payees)
Proto-Personas
To align with corporate banking governance, I developed functional proto-personas to map the multi-layered authorization workflows required for enterprise liquidity management.
Access Control Mapping:
We defined distinct functional boundaries for Doers, Approvers, and Self-Approvers to mitigate internal fraud and operational risk.
Risk-Mitigated UX:
By mapping happy paths for each role, we ensured the UI structurally prevents unauthorized actions—such as a Doer finalizing high-value transfers—aligning the design with the bank’s core security policies.
Taskflow
Solving for Transactional Complexity
The challenge was unifying disparate payment methods—each with unique processing times and FX requirements—into a cohesive interface.
Systemic Status Management:
I designed a notification hierarchy to track real-time lifecycles, clearly distinguishing between settled, pending, and failed transactions.
Unified Data Architecture:
By synthesizing critical data points into a centralized summary view, I ensured full visibility for high-stakes reporting and reconciliation.
Standardized Interaction Patterns:
I established consistent UI patterns across all payment types to minimize friction when transitioning between domestic and international workflows.
Wireframes
Version 1: Mid-Fidelity Prototyping and Strategic Alignment
To validate technical feasibility and roadmap capacity, I developed a mid-fidelity framework to socialize the payment engine concept with executive stakeholders and lead user testing.
Stakeholder Buy-in and Engineering Sync
Presenting this prototype to VPs and Technical Leads was critical for aligning our design ambition with build-level reality.
Architecture Validation:
Demonstrated a scalable data model that balanced high-level payment summaries with full-page detail views—a key requirement for enterprise reporting.
Feature Monetization:
Successfully pitched the integration of live FX market rates, directly addressing a primary churn factor for international clients.
Collaborating with our User Researcher, we evaluated navigation efficiency and task completion rates across the bulk workflow. Following the sessions, I led the synthesis of feedback to identify "high-impact, high-feasibility" refinements, ensuring our design iterations remained within the project’s resource and timeline constraints.
Version 2: Iterative Refinement: Optimizing for High-Density Data
Following stakeholder and usability testing, I led a strategic pivot to resolve cognitive overload and layout inefficiency. My focus was on transforming the payment entry experience from a single-page long-form into a structured, multi-stage workflow.
Structural Evolution and Component Strategy
To improve task focus and development velocity, I replaced the initial card-based layout with a robust, responsive table architecture.
Cognitive Load Reduction:
I implemented a multi-page flow that decoupled "data entry" from "final review," allowing users to focus on precision without the distraction of previous entries.
Scanability and Information Density:
The shift to a table component enabled faster auditing of large data sets. I standardized key columns—payee, amount, and destination—to provide a consistent mental model across all payment rails.
Engineering Alignment:
By utilizing existing design system components, I reduced front-end complexity and eliminated the need for excessive scrolling, a critical improvement for users managing 10+ concurrent payments.
Final Impact
The Design Strategy:
The final solution transformed a manual, high-risk process into a high-velocity automated engine. By shifting the architecture from ad-hoc single entries to a structured batch-processing model, we successfully neutralized the primary barrier to enterprise adoption.
Strategic Outcomes
Operational Efficiency:
The introduction of payment templates and batch-upload capabilities reduced transaction time for large-scale payroll by approximately 70%, matching the automation standards of third-party fintech challengers.
Risk Mitigation:
By hard-coding maker-checker governance into the UI, we eliminated the potential for unauthorized high-value transfers, significantly reducing the bank’s operational liability.
Market Position:
The inclusion of real-time FX tracking and multi-entity data consolidation positioned the platform as a competitive "system of intelligence," rather than just a legacy ledger.
Development Velocity:
Leveraging standardized design system components allowed the engineering team to deploy the MVP ahead of schedule, ensuring a faster time-to-market for the new enterprise segment.