Payment Processor
The platform helps fintech clients issue and manage digital payment products like cards and authorisation logic. Before this redesign, onboarding was spread across emails, spreadsheets, and decentralised knowledge—slowing teams down, introducing errors, and eroding trust across departments.
London, UK
2007
Fintech
£70M (2022)
200-500 employees
Challenge
Manual setups across spreadsheets and shared docs
High error rates during configuration handovers
Long onboarding cycles—up to 64 days
Zero version control and unclear ownership
Results
Cut onboarding time to 14 days
Reduced manual errors with built-in logic
Improved research-product-dev alignment by 30%
Created the foundation for future self-serve onboarding
80%
Reduction in onboarding time (from 64 days to 14)
60%
Estimated decrease in manual config errors post-redesign
30%
Improvement in cross-team alignment (research → product → dev)
Approximate representation of previous software layout
Setup wizard
Process
Research & Framing
To ground the redesign in real-world needs, I began with a series of interviews with implementation managers and product owners. These conversations helped surface key friction points—like miscommunications during handovers and reliance on out-of-date internal tools. I mapped the full onboarding journey from both the client's and internal team's perspectives to frame opportunities clearly.
Design & Prototyping
From there, I designed a modular setup wizard that broke the process into digestible steps. Each section was tailored to product components—like card configuration or authorisation logic—and used progressive disclosure to avoid overwhelming users. The design introduced contextual defaults and guardrails to minimise user error while still supporting complex edge cases.
Testing & Iteration
With high-fidelity prototypes in hand, I facilitated weekly feedback sessions across compliance, product, and engineering teams. These collaborative reviews helped us stress-test logic and UI patterns early, keeping rework low and momentum high. By the time we moved into handoff, alignment was already built in.
“Karina exemplifies collaborative design. She’s earned trust across teams by aligning diverse viewpoints and rallying stakeholders around shared goals. Her ability to lead with empathy while delivering high-quality solutions—often with minimal direction—has made a lasting impact.”
Conclusion
The redesign transformed a messy, manual process into a structured, guided experience that supported both flexibility and consistency. It enabled the team to reduce operational friction, improve delivery accuracy, and build a scalable onboarding model fit for future automation.