Designing Trust Into High-Stakes Corporate Digital Money Flows
A design case study on enabling corporate clients to move, settle, and use digital assets
Disclaimer: The Work for this project is protected under NDA, so any visuals shown have been produced for illustrative purposes and are not the actual work produced
About the project
The client, a major UK bank, wanted to explore how blockchain technology and digital assets could improve the way large corporate and institutional clients move, trade and settle money.
Existing processes often involve multiple systems, manual steps and lengthy settlement times. The ambition was to introduce a digital asset platform that could make transactions faster, more efficient and easier to track.
The project focused on designing the initial platform and its core customer journeys, bringing these new capabilities into the bank's existing corporate banking offering while maintaining the controls and approval processes clients rely on.
My role
I led the product design across key customer and colleague journeys, including wallet creation, funding, trading, transfers and approvals.
I worked across multiple feature teams, setting design direction, shaping solutions with product and technology colleagues, and ensuring a consistent experience across the platform.
The team
- Lead product designer
- Product designer
- Product owners
- Subject matter experts
- Customer journey managers
- Researchers
- Front-end developers
- Back-end developers
- Solution architects
- Operations & compliance
The Essentials
Designing for digital assets meant solving for two key challenges:
- Modernising corporate money flows
Beyond faster settlement, the challenge was helping clients understand and trust how their money moved, while reducing uncertainty in highly controlled banking processes.
- Designing for an emerging technology
Digital assets were new to the bank and unfamiliar to clients. With few established design patterns, we needed to create intuitive experiences that built confidence in the technology.
Getting started (Discovery)
Understanding the current experience
While we were aware of the challenges within existing banking workflows, we wanted to understand how these played out in practice.
We interviewed trading staff and corporate clients, alongside reviewing existing processes and mapping key user journeys. Interestingly, some users were comfortable with the current ways of working, reinforcing the need to understand what was worth improving rather than assuming everything needed to change.
Current state mapping
We mapped the current-state collateral journey in detail, exploring how different teams manage approvals, settlement and reconciliation. The high-level view below illustrates the key stages and highlights where manual handoffs, fragmented systems and delays create opportunities for improvement.
Key themes from discovery
Three key themes emerged from our discovery work:
- Fragmented systems: Settlement processes rely on multiple platforms and controls, creating delays.
- Manual effort: Significant time is spent coordinating transactions and reconciling records.
- Maintaining control: Any new solution must simplify processes without compromising oversight and auditability.
Defining future-state needs
Working closely with the product manager, we translated these themes into future-facing needs that shaped the design direction:
- As a Cash Manager, I need to move funds or assets knowing settlement will occur as agreed, without coordinating across intermediaries.
- As an Authorised Signatory, I need to approve transaction terms upfront, confident that execution will follow those rules automatically.
- As a Treasury or Risk lead, I need clear visibility and auditability of activity so control is maintained even as manual steps are reduced.
Competitor research insights
With a better understanding of the operational challenges, we explored how other platforms approached digital assets, particularly how they presented complex information and supported key workflows.
We reviewed a mix of external digital asset platforms and the client's existing corporate banking products, looking at navigation, terminology and interaction patterns.
Four key observations emerged:
- Terminology: Digital asset terminology varied significantly across platforms, with little consistency in how concepts were explained.
- Navigation: Retail and institutional platforms took different approaches to organising workflows and supporting transactions.
- Information structure: Certain patterns made complex concepts easier to understand and helped users navigate unfamiliar processes.
- Transaction visibility: Platforms varied in how they communicated transaction status, with some providing clearer progress updates, confirmations and transaction histories than others.
These findings informed our early design direction, helping us establish familiar interaction patterns while accounting for the controls and governance expected in corporate banking.
The Solution
Defining the MVP approach
We recognised that many of the bank's existing processes, systems and controls would need to remain in place. The challenge was understanding how digital assets could fit within this ecosystem and where they could add value.
For the initial MVP, we focused on introducing core digital asset capabilities that worked alongside existing infrastructure, while laying the foundations for greater automation and more streamlined processes in the future.
With this understanding, we moved into defining how these new capabilities would be expressed to users. The underlying blockchain enabled increased automation, and our role was to shape journeys that make those concepts clear and usable within familiar operational frameworks.
- Wallet Creation & Onboarding - A guided setup that introduces the wallet, explains what it’s used for, and sets expectations before any money is added.
- Adding Funds - A focused flow for moving money into the wallet, showing balance changes, pending activity, and approval status in real time.
- Asset Discovery & Trading - Customers can browse available digital assets, choose units or amounts, and review purchases with clear information on price, total value, and asset type. Transactions are executed automatically via smart contracts for speed and reliability.
- Transfers & Approval Flows - Designed for operational efficiency, allowing approvals, rejections, and notifications, while automation through smart contracts reduces manual steps and keeps users confident in the process.
Testing our assumptions
Working with a researcher, we tested a clickable prototype with clients, covering wallet setup, adding funds and purchasing assets. Beyond usability, we wanted to understand how clients interpreted the proposition and where our assumptions needed challenging.
Four key findings emerged:
- Familiar reference points: Clients often compared the platform to public crypto exchanges, highlighting the need to better explain its role within corporate banking.
- Understanding digital money: Some clients didn't realise that adding funds created a digital representation of their money.
- Transaction inputs: Clients were sometimes unsure whether they were entering a monetary value or an asset quantity when purchasing assets.
- Understanding the value: Clients needed to see how the platform would improve on their existing workflows. Some benefits, such as faster settlement and reduced manual effort, were difficult to demonstrate through a prototype alone.
These findings helped us refine terminology, improve how balances and transactions were presented, and identify where the wider proposition needed better explanation.
Turning insight into action (opportunity mapping)
After running the research sessions, we held an opportunity mapping session to turn what we learned into clear, actionable design directions. The team reviewed feedback from the prototype walkthroughs and interviews, looking for areas where users struggled to understand how their money moved or interacted with digital assets.
From research to design decisions
Research and prototype walkthroughs highlighted where clients needed more confidence in how the platform behaved, particularly around how money appeared, how investments were entered, and how automated activity remained visible within existing control frameworks.
This led to several key design shifts:
- Remove ambiguity when investing
Inputs were redesigned to show both monetary value and asset quantity together, allowing users to see the relationship between the two. This mirrors familiar investment experiences and removes uncertainty about what they are committing to.
Before
After
- Align to corporate, not retail, mental models
We moved away from internal blockchain terminology such as “fund” and “defund”, using familiar banking language like “deposit” and “withdraw”.
We also redesigned the deposit review screen to make the conversion from GBP to digital GBP easier to understand, explain what happens to clients’ money and prioritise key transaction details over technical information.
Both changes helped make an unfamiliar digital asset experience feel more like the corporate banking workflows clients already knew.
Before
After
Before
After
- Make system-driven activity feel accountable
Some actions are executed automatically, but clients still need to reconcile them within their own controls and reporting. We focused on showing clear records, timestamps, and references so automated events could be understood and verified as part of normal operational workflows.
Results & Outcomes
The experience developed through this project helped bring the proposition into practice, supporting a landmark pilot that connected tokenised deposits, digital assets, and traditional banking infrastructure in an end-to-end transaction.
Launch milestone
UK first
The UK's first public-blockchain transaction using tokenised deposits, and the world's first issuance of sterling tokenised deposits on a public blockchain.
Transaction outcome
Real-time
Tokenised deposits were used to purchase a tokenised UK government bond with instant settlement, reducing settlement and non-payment risk.
Proof of viability
End-to-end
Demonstrated that digital assets and traditional banking systems could work together smoothly within one end-to-end transaction.
Key Learnings & Looking Ahead
One of the biggest takeaways was that introducing new technology doesn't mean replacing the processes banks already rely on. We had to consider how digital assets would work alongside existing approvals, controls and reporting requirements.
With few established design patterns in this space, we also had to make decisions about how to structure the platform and explain unfamiliar concepts without adding unnecessary complexity.
For me, the challenge was making digital assets feel like a natural part of the bank's existing offering, rather than something entirely new that clients had to learn how to use.