At Credit Suisse I worked within the Digital Transformation team in Risk and Compliance. The UBO Grouping Platform was an internal tool designed to give the bank a consolidated, accurate view of Ultimate Beneficial Ownership structures for high-net-worth clients in the shipping finance sector. These were clients with complex, multi-jurisdictional asset structures, and the decisions being made on the back of this data were consequential. Getting the design right was not a UX nicety. It was a business and compliance necessity.
Client:
Credit Suisse
My Role:
Product Designer
Year:
2020-2022
Service Provided:
UX/UI Design, User Research, Workshop Facilitation, Project Management
The Problem
The bank lacked a centralised system for tracking and verifying beneficial ownership across borders. Client data was fragmented, often managed across Excel sheets shared by email, making it difficult to get an accurate, up-to-date picture of a client's total asset position or risk profile. For a team making credit and loan decisions on portfolios in the seven to nine figure range, that fragmentation was a serious operational risk.
There was also a structural complexity that the existing tools couldn't handle. The bank needed to distinguish whether a Special Purpose Vehicle was owned by a natural person or another entity, a distinction that becomes critical in the event of bankruptcy and one that existing systems made extremely difficult to surface clearly.
The Solution
The platform consolidated client data across borders into a single, transparent view, giving compliance analysts and relationship managers the information they needed to make accurate credit assessments and approve loan requests with confidence. It surfaced SPV ownership structures clearly, reducing the risk of misinterpretation in high-stakes scenarios.
We also designed a specialised reporting feature for the bank's top twenty clients, giving senior teams strategic visibility into portfolio breadth and asset rankings at a level that hadn't previously been possible.
The core design challenge throughout was knowing what to surface and when. This was not a product where simplification was always the right answer. The users were experts who needed detail, in the right structure, at the right moment. Every information architecture decision was made with that in mind.
