Confidence in alternative investments.
TitanBay set out to give wealth managers, private banks, and institutional investors curated access to private equity, venture capital, and real-estate funds. The real challenge was never the interface. It was the confidence the product had to earn before anyone would move capital into something this complex. As Lead Product Designer, I led the design team end to end, from research to delivery, turning genuine financial complexity into decisions people could actually make.
TitanBay, the private-market platform for wealth managers and their clients.
At a glance
Product
Private Market Platform
Year
2022
My role
Lead Product Designer
Partner
Sparck
Location
Lisbon · London
Channels
B2B + Direct
Business Context
On a mission to transform private markets.
Private markets have always been the preserve of institutions and deep personal networks. Access is scarce, the process runs on PDFs and phone calls, and the information is dense by nature. TitanBay's ambition was to make that world more accessible, transparent, and efficient for wealth managers and their clients.
The platform had to simplify access to exclusive opportunities and let wealth managers navigate real complexity with ease, so they could act with agility and confidence and bring investment solutions to their clients faster.
It also had to do this twice over, serving a B2B partners channel and a direct channel from the same foundations.
“The best financial products don't simplify investing. They simplify understanding.”
B2B
Partners channel, white-labelled to each firm's brand.
B2C
Direct channel for investors and their wealth managers.
The Challenge
Why investing here creates uncertainty.
Designing this experience took far more than attractive screens. Alternative investments combine large amounts of information, real risk, unfamiliar terminology, and strict regulation, and every one of those works against a confident decision.
Information overload
Fund data, structures, terms, and risk profiles arrive all at once. Presented poorly, the sheer volume erodes confidence rather than building it.
Trust before capital
Users commit real money into illiquid, long-horizon products. They need transparency and genuine understanding before they will act, not marketing.
Regulatory friction
Private-market investing carries strict compliance requirements that can turn the experience into a maze if they are bolted on rather than designed in.
Two audiences, one platform
A B2B partners channel and a direct channel had legitimately different needs, and both had to be served without fracturing the product.
Thirteen opportunities, each carrying target IRR, MOIC, size and status: the density a wealth manager faces before a single decision.
Understanding the Problem
I mapped the whole journey before designing any of it.
In research sessions I ran with wealth managers, private banks, and institutional investors, a consistent picture surfaced. What they wanted wasn't more features. It was a streamlined process, an interface they could trust, and access to top-tier funds with minimum effort.
The TitanBay service blueprint: the entire journey, front-stage to back-stage. Click to open the full board.
“Trust is designed long before a user ever clicks Invest.”
My Role
Leading design in a startup with many moving parts.
What I owned
Product design end to end, from initial user research through to final implementation, and the design team delivering it. I built and led a new group of designers inside a fast-moving startup.
What I influenced
Product strategy and prioritisation, the balance between conversion goals and investor trust, and how compliance requirements were designed into the experience rather than layered on top.
How I worked
Through structured workshops and design sprints that brought leadership, product, and compliance into alignment, and through research and testing that kept decisions grounded in real investor behaviour.
Strategy
Two tracks, one confident experience.
The work ran on two tracks at once: a product track defining the core journeys, and a systems track building a scalable, fully white-label design system. Running them together meant the system reflected real product needs rather than anticipated ones. These principles governed the trade-offs along the way.
The platform capability map that held both tracks together: operational services, the investment loop, and the principles the systems track was built to.
01
Trust before conversion
In a financial product, trust is the prerequisite for engagement. Transparency in data, fees, and risk came before any optimisation for the funnel.
02
Make complexity legible
The answer to dense information isn't less of it. It's structure, hierarchy, and progressive disclosure that keep depth available without overwhelming the decision.
03
Educate, don't just convert
Guiding investors through what they were committing to, rather than rushing them to a button, was the difference between a click and a confident decision.
04
White-label from day one
A customisable, maintainable design system let partners apply their own brand and gave the business a foundation it could scale on.
Designing the Experience
Organised around the investor's decisions.
Interface design came only after the strategy was set. Each screen is built around a decision the investor is trying to make, not a feature the platform wanted to show.
Evaluating an opportunity
The moment of highest stakes and highest complexity. Target IRR, MOIC, fund size, lifetime, minimums, and supporting materials sit together so an investor can size up a fund at a glance and go deeper on their own terms.
Requesting an allocation
The commitment itself is a short, guarded modal: choose the investing entity, enter the amount, and the platform validates before it lets you submit, then says plainly that the allocation is not guaranteed until the General Partner accepts it.
01 · Request
02 · Validate before submit
03 · Processed
Managing a portfolio
Once invested, wealth managers needed to see exposure at a glance. The portfolio overview breaks holdings down by strategy, vertical, geography, vintage, and currency, with commitments and performance in one legible view.
Confident on any device
A mobile-first approach meant the same clarity carried across devices. A wealth manager could review an opportunity, share it, and act on it from a phone without losing any of the depth the decision required.
Key Decisions
The decisions that shaped the product.
Complex products aren't simplified through interfaces. They're simplified through better decisions. These are the four that defined the direction of TitanBay.
Decision 01
Design an educational onboarding, not a pure conversion funnel.
Why
The business wanted to optimise funnel conversion. Investors needed trust, transparency, and education before committing capital. Rushing them worked against both.
Trade-off
Guiding and teaching upfront adds steps a pure conversion funnel would cut, and asks the business to trust a slower first mile.
Outcome
An onboarding that guided investors without overwhelming them, validated through A/B testing, that balanced trust against conversion instead of trading one for the other.
Decision 02
Make complex financial data legible instead of hiding it.
Why
Fund terms, risk, IRR, MOIC, and portfolio exposure are essential to a confident decision. They couldn't be oversimplified away without breaking trust.
Trade-off
Keeping all the necessary information present risks density. Staying both complete and accessible took iterative testing and feedback loops.
Outcome
An experience that held full financial depth while remaining scannable.
Decision 03
Build a white-label design system from day one.
Why
The platform served a B2B partners channel and a direct channel. Partners needed their own brand, and the product needed consistency at scale.
Trade-off
Investing in a customisable system early is slower than shipping fixed screens, and needs buy-in before its value is visible.
Outcome
A scalable, maintainable system partners could rebrand with their own logos and colours, built to support future product expansion.
Decision 04
Design compliance into the flow, not on top of it.
Why
Private-market investing carries strict compliance requirements that create real friction if they're treated as an afterthought.
Trade-off
Compliance steps can't simply be removed, so the work was absorbing them into the experience rather than fighting them.
Outcome
An adaptive onboarding flow that adjusted to each user profile, shaped in close partnership with legal and compliance, that stayed compliant without feeling like a maze.
Foundations
A design system built to wear anyone's brand.
Consistency at this scale needed a system, not a set of screens. Components, tokens, grids, and colour were built for full white-labelling, so partners could apply their own identity while the product stayed coherent and maintainable.
Design-system foundations: colour, components, and states, prepared for white-label.
The same components, worn by a partner: a tenant-branded opportunity page, and the clients view wealth managers work from.
Working Across Teams
Alignment was as much of the work as design.
Leadership & stakeholders
In a startup with many moving parts, expectations pulled in different directions. Structured workshops and design sprints created transparency and brought leadership, product, and compliance to a shared view before execution began.
Product & business
Business wanted funnel conversion; users needed trust. Rather than pick a side, we used research and A/B testing to find designs that served both, so the tension became a design input instead of an argument.
Legal & compliance
Compliance requirements shape what's even possible in private markets. Working closely with legal and compliance, we designed an adaptive flow that stayed compliant while removing friction that didn't need to be there.
The design team
Leading a new group of designers meant building a culture of collaboration and keeping focus through rapid change. The design system became the shared language that let the team move quickly without drifting apart.
Business Impact
A platform that earned its users' confidence.
The platform was well received, giving wealth managers institutional-level access and reduced investment minimums, and a stronger ability to diversify their clients' portfolios in alternative investments.
A system built to carry more than one product
A white-label design system and a set of investor journeys, built so the business could add products on the same foundations.
Built to scale
A system designed to support future product expansion, so growth didn't mean rebuilding the foundations.
Stronger design maturity
New UX frameworks and a shared design system improved cross-team collaboration well beyond the initial launch.
01 · Register
02 · Suitability
03 · Cleared to view opportunities
Trust before conversion, in practice: an investor registers, completes suitability, and only then sees opportunities.
Reflection
Clarity, not fewer capabilities.
TitanBay taught me that complex products don't need fewer capabilities. They need clearer decisions. The instinct in a dense domain is to strip things away; what actually helped was structuring the complexity so people could hold it, understand it, and act on it.
It also reframed what trust means in a product. Trust isn't a badge or a testimonial. It's designed into every step long before a user clicks Invest, in how honestly the risk is shown and how little the experience asks people to take on faith.
It's the same thread that runs through the NHS Digital Regulations Service, adidas, and British Airways: my work isn't really about financial interfaces or booking flows. It's about turning complex domains into products people can understand, trust, and confidently use.
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