Finleap Connect* is a leading independent open banking platform provider in Europe empowering banks and financial institutions with cutting-edge financial tools.
The company had experienced rapid growth through acquisitions, which, while positive, created a significant issue: the product portfolio became fragmented. Each acquired company brought its own tech stack and design language, leading to inconsistencies across the product portfolio. This made it difficult to sell as a unified offering, not to mention slowing down the design and development processes, and creating inconsistencies for the end-users.
To address this issue, we set up an ambitious objective to unify the entire product offering through a common Design System that would simplify our internal workflows and provide more cohesive and professional experience for our clients, who needed easy-to-implement, customizable solutions that aligned with their own brand identities.
My role as a product designer was to kick-start this initiative, handle our cross-team collaboration and contribute my part to the development, documentation and handover of the shared design system, that by the end of the project replaced the different systems we had in place.
*The company was renamed as Qwist after the project ended.
We faced a portfolio of 4 product lines of comprehensive solutions from connecting to banking systems to using open banking data for verification, risk profiling and opportunity identification.
Our core challenge was that these product lines were managed by multiple teams and we couldn’t start from scratch in terms of development, as all the products were already out and running. We needed to come up with an agile and global approach to accomodate all the teams' needs.
Additionally, our bonus challenge was that the company had just gone through a rebranding which we needed to adapt within the design system and use as the default styles to showcase our products and brand identity to our clients.
