Project

Freshbooks - Embedded Banking

My role:
Product Design Lead — Freshbooks (2021–2022)

At FreshBooks, I worked as a Product Design Lead managing a distributed team across Toronto, the UK, and Amsterdam. Leading across time zones meant building strong alignment without relying on constant overlap, so I focused on creating clear processes, shared design standards, and a culture of ownership within the team.

I was responsible for setting the design direction, supporting designers in their growth, and ensuring consistency across products while still allowing space for local context and autonomy. This included running structured critiques, aligning closely with product and engineering, and making sure decisions were grounded in both user needs and business goals.

Operating in a remote, cross-regional setup pushed me to be intentional about communication, documentation, and collaboration. It strengthened my ability to lead at scale, keep teams connected, and deliver high-quality work without slowing down momentum.

Embedded Banking

Helping small business owners run their businesses, partnered with JPMorgan Chase & Co

Product Vision

Existing FreshBooks customers using our payments solution had to manually sweep funds from their merchant accounts into a bank account to access and use them for running their business. This process was often slow, complex, and fragmented, requiring multiple banking products and integrations.

In practice, this created unnecessary delays in accessing cash, limited visibility into available funds, and added operational overhead for business owners already managing multiple priorities. Instead of having a clear, real-time view of their financial position, users were forced to reconcile information across disconnected systems. This not only increased the risk of errors but also made it harder to make confident decisions about spending, saving, or reinvesting in their business.

Through our partnership with JPMorgan Chase, we focused on closing this gap by rethinking how payments and banking could work together within FreshBooks. The goal was to reduce friction, improve cash flow visibility, and create a more seamless experience that supports day-to-day financial management.

Why Banking as a Service?

Embedded banking in invoicing software is a game-changer for small and medium business owners. By integrating financial services directly into the tools they already use, it eliminates the friction of switching between banking apps and invoicing platforms. This means business owners can send invoices, receive payments, manage cash flow, and even access banking features like virtual cards or funds transfers, all in one seamless workflow.

For SMBs, time is money, and embedded banking streamlines operations, improves cash flow visibility, and reduces administrative overhead. It empowers owners to make smarter financial decisions faster, enhances payment security, and ultimately strengthens the overall business ecosystem by turning invoicing software into a hub for both operations and finance.

Context

The project team worked iteratively on a hybrid approach for FreshBooks, refining the solution step by step. There was ongoing dialogue between Freshbooks customers to validate assumptions and fine-tune recommendations, ensuring a balance between functionality, user experience, and speed to market. Additional input from research done by Frog design, hired by JP Morgan and Chase Co. was needed to support feature prioritization and guide the next phase of development.

Embedded Banking for FreshBooks' Three Owner Segments

FreshBooks served three distinct types of small business owners, each with unique cash flow needs that make embedded banking a natural fit within their invoicing workflow.

‍Order-Based owners run high-volume, standardized service businesses where speed is everything. With jobs completing in hours or days, they need instant payment access the moment an invoice is settled. Embedded banking would let them sweep funds directly into a business account without ever leaving the platform — eliminating the lag between "paid" and "in my pocket."

‍Job-Based owners — who represent a massive 44% of small businesses seeking accounting software — juggle custom, variable-scope work across a moderate delivery window. Their irregular income makes cash flow unpredictable. An embedded banking layer could offer short-term working capital advances tied directly to outstanding invoices, helping them bridge the gap between project start costs and client payment.

‍Project-Based owners face the longest delivery cycles, with weeks or months between milestones and frequent client check-ins. For them, embedded banking unlocks milestone-based payment releases, automated savings "buckets" for tax season, and credit facilities that scale with the size and duration of their pipeline — all surfaced inside the tool they're already using to manage client billing.Across all three segments, the common thread is reducing friction between completing work and accessing money — which is precisely what embedded banking inside an invoicing platform delivers.

Collaboration between JP Morgan and Chase Co.

The design teams strategy around our partnership with JPMC focused collaborative sessions and workshops as well as gathered data and conducting research independently within the organization. We wanted to focus on first imagining a seamless, end-to-end financial experience within FreshBooks. The goal was to envision how we could move beyond disconnected tools and design a unified system where invoicing, payments, and banking work together naturally. After our bluesky session we prioritised based on technical feasibility. We wanted our proposed solution to be led clarity, trust, and speed, while ensuring the experience could support both simple and more complex financial needs as businesses grow.

Final Solution

Our final solution focused on delivering the key highlighted features in the first phase of the project.

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Freshbooks - Embedded Banking

My role:Product Design Lead — Freshbooks (2021–2022)

My role:
Product Design Lead — Freshbooks (2021–2022)