Business Banking, Rethunk

Novo is a banking platform for small businesses that had grown by shipping feature after feature, with no shared infrastructure underneath. Before any identity work could start, I built the company's first design system and an internal testing portal — the foundation everything below is built on.

Novo stood up a brand function and began a redesign, which meant re-examining the ideal customer — and surfaced a question the company had never formally answered: what kind of tool is Novo?

Leadership aligned on a banking-first identity — it answers the most fundamental need and leans into the core revenue drivers: float, interchange, credit. I developed it into an information architecture proposal covering the whole ecosystem and took it across product, engineering, design and leadership.

The product had an attention problem — pop-ups, banners, tags and alerts all competing with no hierarchy. I designed an in-app inbox to unify everything that needs a user's attention.

No dedicated PM or engineering IC, so I owned the full scope: PRD, RFC, journey mapping, content management, and lifecycle messaging with marketing across email, push and SMS.

Invoicing, adding money and sending money had separate entry points despite being one mental model. Inside send money, bill pay was functionally identical to domestic with a document upload attached, and recipients had to be assigned to each of five payment methods by hand.

I consolidated it into a single move-money entry point. Fragmented entries became one interaction, redundant flows merged. Design, logic and documentation end to end.

An engineer was building a support chatbot. I proposed expanding it into an in-product partner — something that answers “what bills am I paying?” with a synthesized response rather than a link.

I designed the prompt architecture, the safety constraints and a four-phase rollout, each phase gated on guardrail performance rather than feature completeness. The system can analyse spending and explain the product; it cannot cross into financial advice.

Checking, credit, external, integration and lending accounts all live in separate places despite all being accounts. I'm scoping a unified view where they roll up into one picture of financial health.

The design system, testing portal, inbox and money-movement restructure have shipped. AI chat and the dashboard are in active development. A brand redesign is underway and riding on a token swap rather than a screen-by-screen rebuild.

Prototypes create momentum in a way documents don't. When I walked leadership through the unified money-movement flow the conversation changed in the room — from whether to do it to when we could ship it. Same idea, same evidence, different artefact.

And a conversational interface is only as trustworthy as the architecture behind it. Without a system that knows what it knows, you have put a chat bubble on top of chaos.