Designing for Expansion: Re-thinking Financial Flows for the US Market
B2C Engagement, Gamification &
Data-driven Design
Our business aimed to expand into the United States, but the existing UK financial model could not be transplanted directly. Under US law, operating with the same structure would require a costly and complex banking licence. This project explored a new operational and product design approach to unlock this market opportunity while keeping costs and regulatory risk manageable.
🧠 The Challenge
To enter the US market without a banking licence, we needed to redesign internal financial flows and adjust product journeys to reflect a different way of handling participant payments. Strategic US accounts had also expressed a preference for a SaaS-style arrangement where they pay a single subscription fee that covers service charges, participant payments and tax, instead of the existing agent relationship. The core question was: how could we support this new business model and align the product experience with new operational requirements?
🧩 My Role
I undertook this work as the lead product designer across two focused design sprints (two weeks). I coordinated discovery, explored structural options for financial flows, mapped user journeys, and produced interactive prototypes to evaluate new payment configurations. I also collaborated closely with product leadership, finance and legal stakeholders to ensure feasibility.
💡 Discovery & Ideation
We began by analysing the current operational model and identifying regulatory constraints that would block expansion. I mapped the end-to-end participant journey under the UK model and highlighted key pain points where regulatory requirements and business expectations diverged.
I then workshoped alternative approaches with stakeholders, prioritising ideas that allowed for a SaaS-style payment structure without triggering banking licence requirements. This included sketching out new flow diagrams in Miro and drafting lo-fi wireframes in Figma to represent how lump-sum payments would be handled and reconciled internally.
User journey maps helped visualise how customers would interact with the new payment options and where changes were most critical. These artefacts fed directly into interactive prototypes, which enabled us to explore edge cases and capture early internal feedback.
🚀 The Solution
The resulting design defined a new operational setup that separated the customer’s payment flow from regulated financial activities. Internally, we configured streamlined processes to settle participant payments on the back end, while externally customers experienced a simplified SaaS-style purchase and onboarding flow. The updated journey reduced cognitive burden for users and aligned with business goals for US market entry.
A link to the prototype in Figma was shared with stakeholders throughout the process to gather feedback and test assumptions.
📊 Outcomes & Impact
The proposed solution creates a foundation for US expansion that avoids the need for a banking licence and meets customer demand for a clearer, simpler commercial model. Internally, the design artefacts and prototypes form a blueprint that engineering and operations teams can take forward into development and compliance assessment.
Next steps include validating the model with legal/regulatory experts, iterating the prototype with targeted user tests, and aligning engineering on implementation requirements.
This project underscored how regulatory constraints can shape product design and how cross-functional collaboration is essential when tackling complex operational challenges.