Unifying 5 Product Lines Into One Platform for 4,300+ Financial Institutions
Kinective's five product lines give 4,300+ banks and credit unions the tools to run branches, documents, data, and risk, but years of acquisitions left those tools as disconnected applications, each with its own login, navigation, and identity.
I led design end-to-end, from discovery through shipped UI, defining a new information architecture and building the shell on the Prism design system so it could hold consistent across Vue and React codebases owned by different teams.
The Kinective Banking Operations Platform is the unified workspace through which banks and credit unions run branch operations, document workflow, data intelligence, and fraud and risk.
Initial release coming 2026
TLDR Overview
- Role: Head of UX and lead designer. I designed the shell hands-on and directed a second designer on the product-line migrations.
- Team: 2 designers, Vue and React front-end engineering teams, VPs of Product, Engineering, and Marketing as decision partners
- Timeline: Phased delivery, shell first, product lines migrating in sequence. Shipping in 2026.
- Challenge: Unify five product lines built by multiple companies into one application shell with a shared navigation model, identity, and workspace, without pausing product roadmaps or forcing a single codebase.
- Focus Areas: Information architecture, navigation model, cross-framework design system governance, executive alignment
Impact
Consolidated five disconnected product experiences into one shell built on the Prism design system, giving Kinective a single navigation model, identity, and workspace across its portfolio.
- One IA for five product lines: every product now maps to a shared navigation model, replacing five separate top-level structures.
- Consistent across two codebases: the shell holds a single token layer and component contract across Vue and React, so parity is enforced by the system rather than by review.
- Zero-downtime brand migration: the Prism token layer re-themed every customer-facing product during the company rebrand with no service interruption, proving the shell's foundation before the platform itself shipped.
- Roadmap alignment at the executive level: design led the decision on navigation and identity with VPs of Product, Engineering, and Marketing, so the platform is shipping as a company commitment rather than a design proposal.
The part that does not fit above is what happens the first time a product team asks for an exception. A shared shell only works if the products inside it accept a limit on what they own, and drawing the boundary does nothing to make them accept it. The diagram persuades nobody who has a release to ship this week.
The requests that test it look entirely sensible in isolation and are fatal as a precedent, and what settles them has less to do with the contract than with
The rest of this one is under NDA, and on request.
What's above is the shape of the work. The full study carries the artifacts, the decisions that didn't survive contact with the org, and the numbers underneath the outcomes. I'd rather walk you through that part and take the awkward questions live.
Start the conversation
If you're hiring for design leadership, I'd like to hear what you're building.