BNY, Improving Payment Platforms
Enabling banks to track payment data over $9.5B in transactions
7min read
ROLE
Product Designer
TIMELINE
2025
TEAM
IMPACT
Design Outcomes
Led the redesign of the Unified Payment Platform (UPP), enabling users to efficiently track, manage, and edit payment processing data for over 9.5 billion dollars in transactions.
Boosted user satisfaction by 25% via 7 user interviews, usability testing sessions, and design iterations.
Collaborated with cross-functional teams of product managers, engineers, and designers to align design solutions with business goals and technical feasibility, accelerating delivery timelines by 15%.
Conducted quantitative and qualitative research to inform key design decisions and effectively communicate insights to stakeholders and leadership.
CONTEXT
What is Unified Payment Platform (UPP)?
In late 2024, I joined the Global Payments & Trade team to redesign Unified Payment Platform (UPP): a core internal tool used daily by hundreds of operations and finance professionals to track, monitor, and edit payment processing information.
THE PROBLEM
Processing Key Information
There were a lot of issues with the legacy system.
Dense payment details and cluttered layouts make even simple actions overwhelming.
Critical records needing attention were buried, leading to missed actions.
PROBLEM #1
Information Overload
Looking at Excel, users had to drill down through busy columns to find key information they need to track payments.
Compounded by juggling between multiple platforms (Excel, UPP, APY) for different data, users had to sift through dense tables and multiple platforms to locate key payment details.
PROBLEM #2
Low discoverability
Critical records needing attention were buried, leading to missed actions.
During a timed usability study, It took users 9.3 seconds to find Shares and Price information in Excel for a specific account. This delay compounded over hundreds of daily transactions, contributing to slower processing times and increased reporting errors.
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PROTOTYPING
Advanced Filtering + Search
Table filtering allowing users to instantly locate relevant transactions via status or transaction type.
Search functionality, giving users the option to search a transaction by Transaction ID, sender, receiver, or amount of money.
FEEDBACK
User Testing
After testing with 4 users, we found that our design changes were successful, however hinted at a different issue: not being able to understand data from a bigger picture.
I love the search feature, and use it every day. But sometimes it feels like I can’t see the bigger picture
USER INSIGHTS
Highlight Patterns, Not Just Details
Users needed dense payment data to be easier to parse at a glance, reducing cognitive overload during high-volume processing
Holistic Data Understanding
Users still struggled to interpret trends and connections between transactions, signaling a need for synthesized, high-level analytics.
NEW FEATURE
Insights & Analytics
Added a new feature allowing users to easily, scannable way for users to read and understand their data
A new table flow with filtering and search transforms complex data scanning into a predictable, goal-directed path that users can follow intuitively.
PROTOTYPING
Data Visualization
Finding the metrics users wanted displayed in real-time was complicated, as well as figuring out which method of data visualization would be most effective. I drafted different versions of line charts, bar graphs, and pie charts depending on the data depicted, as well as different iterations of metrics in designs.
SHIPPING
Collaborating with Engineers to Ship UPP
During production, I joined daily standup calls during a 2 week sprint assisting with design handoff.
REFLECTION
Focusing on Key Flows
During short design sprints, it’s essential to focus on features that align with business objectives while delivering the greatest value to users.
Earlier in the process, I often felt compelled to address every user pain point, but I learned that within a limited timeline, it's more effective to prioritize a few high-impact user flows and execute them well.