Project
Nest Wealth - NATGo Client Experience
Product Design
AI Strategy
Leadership & Growth
![[team] image of individual team member](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6960f9c363fb5a754349de17/69d7b2094c8ca324e0868b19_nest%20wealth.webp)
As a Senior Product Designer at Nest Wealth, I was part of the founding design team responsible for establishing both the design system and the broader design practice from the ground up. I played a key role in scaling the team, leading hiring efforts and growing the function into a high-performing team of five designers. Alongside this, I led the design and development of two critical platforms: an admin experience supporting complex custodial processes, and a complete redesign of the customer-facing experience for National Bank. My work focused on bringing structure, consistency, and strategic impact to design within a fast-evolving fintech environment.
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National Bank of Canada is one of Canada’s largest financial institutions, serving over 2.7 million customers in Canada and nearly 5 million globally. As digital banking adoption accelerated, with over 80% of Canadians using online banking, customer expectations shifted toward seamless, intuitive and personalized financial experiences.
I played a key role in reimagining the end-to-end customer banking experience, with a focus on simplifying account management, enabling goal-based financial planning, and streamlining contribution flows across investment products. This involved redesigning core journeys to reduce friction, improve clarity in financial decision-making, and create a more cohesive relationship between accounts, goals and actions.
In parallel, I was responsible for scaling and managing the design team to support this transformation. I led hiring and team expansion, growing the team to effectively resource multiple high-impact initiatives, while establishing clear ownership across workstreams. I also introduced design practices, rituals and collaboration models that strengthened alignment with product and engineering, enabling faster and more consistent delivery.
Beyond execution, I contributed to building design as a strategic function within the organization, ensuring that design was not only delivering interfaces but shaping product direction, influencing prioritization, and driving measurable customer and business outcomes.
Despite strong financial performance and scale (over $400B+ in assets ), the NATGo customer facing digital experience lagged behind users' expectations:
The experience was structured around internal product silos rather than user needs, resulting in disconnected pathways between accounts, goals and transfers. Users were required to navigate across multiple sections to complete a single task, increasing friction and making it difficult to build a clear mental model of their financial landscape.
Bridging the gap between technology and people, I help organizations harness AI responsibly to unlock new opportunities and drive meaningful change.
Users had little to no visibility into how their actions impacted their financial goals. Progress tracking was either absent or difficult to interpret, making it challenging for users to understand performance, stay motivated or make informed decisions about next steps.
The platform lacked a unified design system, leading to inconsistencies in interaction patterns, layouts and behaviours across key experiences. This reduced usability, slowed down task completion and eroded user trust, as similar actions often behaved differently across the product.
The experience implicitly assumed a level of financial literacy that many users did not have. As a result, non-expert users often felt uncertain, unsupported and hesitant to take action, leading to lower engagement and missed opportunities to drive meaningful financial behaviours.
Fragmented Navigation Across Core Financial Journeys
Users were forced to navigate across disconnected accounts, goals, and transfers to complete a single task, resulting in 30–40% more interactions than necessary, longer task times, and higher drop-off. We restructured the experience around user-centric pathways, unifying accounts, goals, and actions within a single cohesive system. This reduced steps across core journeys by 25–35%, improved task completion rates by 15–20%, and decreased drop-off in cross-functional flows.
High Cognitive Load in Contributions and Investment Actions
Complex contribution and investment flows with unclear terminology caused abandonment rates above 25%, particularly at decision-heavy points. By simplifying these flows with progressive disclosure, smart defaults, and clearer guidance, we reduced mental effort for users. This led to a 10–15 percentage point drop in abandonment, and shorter time to complete key financial actions.
Limited Visibility into Financial Progress and Outcomes
Users lacked visibility into how their actions affected financial goals, with fewer than 40% engaging in goal tracking. Introducing real-time progress tracking, goal visualizations, and forward-looking projections strengthened the feedback loop between actions and outcomes. As a result, goal engagement rose by 10% of active users, repeat contribution rates increased 15–25%, and long-term engagement with financial planning features improved.
Inconsistent UX Patterns Across Core Journeys
The absence of standardized patterns caused inconsistent interactions, confusion, slower task completion, and higher reliance on support. We implemented a scalable design system and unified interaction patterns across all journeys, creating consistency. This reduced user errors, decreased support tickets by 15–20%, and accelerated development cycles through reusable components and patterns.
Low Confidence for Non-Expert Users
The experience assumed high financial literacy, leaving many users hesitant and first-time contributions low. By redesigning flows to build confidence through clarity, guidance, and feedback, financial actions became approachable for all users. This increased first-time contribution success by 20–30%, boosted adoption of investment features among new users, and drove measurable improvements in CSAT and NPS.