Elinvar

Elinvar builds a platform-as-a-service for wealth managers, private banks and asset managers — institutions that want to run digital wealth management without building the infrastructure themselves. The platform carries the workflows those businesses run on: client onboarding and identification, portfolio construction and rebalancing, order management, reporting, and the documentation trail that regulated financial advice requires.

Two structural constraints shaped every design decision on that product.

The first is white-labelling. The platform is not one product with one audience; it is deployed to multiple institutional clients, each applying its own brand and each with its own view of how its advisors should work. Anything designed too tightly around a single client's assumptions becomes an obstacle at the next deployment. Information architecture, component behaviour and visual language all had to be resilient to being re-skinned and reconfigured without losing coherence.

The second is density. These are not consumer screens. A relationship manager works across portfolios, positions, transactions, mandates, suitability records and client history — often simultaneously, often under time pressure, and with regulatory consequences attached to getting it wrong. Simplification in the consumer sense is not available: you cannot remove the data. The design problem is structuring density so that a professional user can navigate it with confidence, which is a different discipline from reducing it.

I joined in early 2020, remotely, at the height of the pandemic — into a complex regulated domain, with no in-person access to the team or to the users whose work the platform supported.

I delivered end-to-end design for new platform features across two and a half years — from information architecture through interface design to the brand and motion work that surrounded the product. In a three-person design team supporting a platform of this scope, ownership is broad by necessity: I worked directly with engineering on feasibility, ran validation myself rather than commissioning it, and took design decisions into stakeholder conversations that reached CTO and C-level.

From 2022 I took on lead responsibilities within the design team.

• Structuring and simplifying information architecture across the platform's portals.
• Designing end-to-end feature flows for data-heavy, regulated wealth-management workflows.
• Running unmoderated user research in Maze to validate design decisions before build.
• Collaborating with engineering throughout implementation rather than at handoff.
• Aligning design direction with stakeholders up to CTO and C-level.
• Developing brand language and carrying it through client communication, assets and motion.
• Taking on design-team lead responsibilities from 2022.

I ran user research in Maze to validate design decisions before they reached engineering. In a small design team working on an expensive-to-build platform, the value of unmoderated testing is not primarily that it produces insight — it is that it converts internal disagreement into a testable question. Where stakeholders held different views about a structure or a flow, running it was faster and more conclusive than continuing to argue it.

Alongside product work I developed brand language and carried it into client communication, asset production and motion design. In a B2B platform business this is less peripheral than it sounds: the institutions evaluating Elinvar are making a multi-year infrastructure commitment, and the material they assess it through — pitch assets, product communication, the way the platform presents itself — is part of how credibility gets established before any contract exists.

Working across both meant the visual language of the product and the language of the company reinforced each other rather than diverging, which is a common failure in companies where brand and product design sit in separate teams.