Payments Operations

March 2026

The EY team engaged our design studio to rapidly shape a future‑state vision for a large financial institution’s payments operations. I was brought in to quickly understand the operations team’s north‑star vision and translate it into a high‑fidelity prototype. The goal was to create a compelling, tangible vision that could be used to align stakeholders and unlock future investment in a transformational operations platform.

My Role: Design Lead
Team: Dan Goldberg (PM)

My Role

I onboarded quickly to the payments operations team as a UX lead, partnering closely with product and operations stakeholders. My role was to translate an emerging operational vision into a clear, experience‑led concept balancing strategic intent with practical workflows that could realistically guide future investment and build alignment across teams.

Research

I conducted rapid discovery with operations stakeholders to understand existing tools, pain points, and operational goals. I quickly turned these into high-level personas and workflows for alignment. I then aligning on priority use cases that would best represent the team’s desired future state as well as solve current user pain points. Research was intentionally lightweight and focused, given the compressed timeline.

Aligning to the North‑Star Vision

All design work was anchored to the operations team’s north‑star vision—creating a unified, intuitive operations experience that could scale across payment rails and processes. We used this vision as a constant filter for decision‑making, ensuring the concept reinforced long‑term goals rather than incremental fixes to existing tools.

Workflows

Key user journeys were created to illustrate how the different personas move through work today and how that experience could evolve in a future‑state platform. These journeys highlighted the basic workflow and opportunities to simplify task management, prioritization, and visibility across payment types and channels.

Prototype / Results

The engagement culminated in a high‑fidelity prototype that brought the future‑state vision to life. The prototype served as a concrete artifact to align stakeholders, spark discussion, and support decision‑making around future funding and investment. By making the vision tangible, the team was able to move beyond abstract strategy and evaluate what a transformed operations experience could look and feel like.