Designing an onboarding experience for complex ownership structures

A regulated business has to know who it's doing business with. That's manageable when the customer is a person, and much harder when it's a company owned by other companies in several countries.

Vaiie Onboard gives compliance teams one source of truth on the customers they take on, and chases up anything missing. I joined at the ideation stage to take it from a proof of concept towards a product.

Client: Vaiie
Categories: RegTech, Startup
Role: Wireframing, Prototyping, UX Design, User Interface Design, 0 to 1 Design
Year: 2025

At a glance

A working HTML prototype that the board, compliance and marketing could all use
A prototype solid enough for a new engineering team to build the MVP from
A visual structure chart that brought ownership mapping out of spreadsheets and Visio and into the product

The problem

Ownership structures are the hard part. They come in layers, cross jurisdictions, and the rules underneath keep changing. Compliance teams were handling them by hand, across systems that didn't talk to each other.

The category was still forming. There was a proof of concept, but no settled product to reference and plenty of informed opinion on what this one should be.

The solution

1. Outgrowing the proof of concept

Working with a product manager, and backed by compliance experts, specifications and consultants, I took wireframes through to high-fidelity mockups. The proof of concept got better, but its technology started holding us back.

Twelve browser windows showing a Vaiie design system documentation site, with component pages for data tables, field types, stacked indicators and toast notifications, each previewing a live Acme Group dashboard or dossier screen alongside its HTML and JSON

2. A prototype people could actually use

I built an HTML prototype in Fractal. Because it was component-based, screens could be assembled from reusable parts, so we could explore ideas faster and at higher fidelity.

Instead of static screens, everyone from the board to compliance and marketing used something close to a real product. Their feedback got much clearer.

A collage of around fifteen Vaiie Onboard screens, including the login, Start Onboarding form, empty dossier view, Create Dossier panel, dossier list table, ownership structure diagram and a dossier risk assessment

Four states of the Vaiie Onboard document upload component: empty, active during a drag and drop, populated with two uploaded files, and with the Remove button in its hover state

Component states from the Vaiie Onboard ownership structure builder: a draggable palette of entity types, the canvas zoom and lock controls, four states of an entity card, and three states of a compact entity row

The Vaiie Onboard interface palette: eight rounded swatches in two columns, four greys and four blues ranging from bright mid-blue through teal and slate to near-black navy

3. From prototype to MVP

A new engineering team took the prototype apart, so the MVP started from more than most first builds get. I built a Figma component library to speed up the main screens. Delivery was agile, from themes down to tasks, with frequent releases so firms could give feedback.

4. The structure chart

Onboardings were built around Dossiers, which changed how the data was grouped. The biggest change was a visual structure chart. Firms were already drawing these in spreadsheets or Visio, separate from the system that held the data.

In the product, entities are added straight into the structure, and risk and missing data show up where they matter.

Someone working across two devices: a laptop showing the Vaiie Onboard ownership structure diagram for Vaiie Investments LLC, with linked entity cards, alongside a phone showing the same onboarding as a task list at 10% complete

Jon branded our entire suite of regulatory technology tools that sit at the heart of the business.
He brought a real moment of clarity during a period of complexity - from brand identity and product design through to working prototypes, and from managing agencies to working directly with clients, he made it all look effortless.