Case Study

Designing an onboarding experience for complex ownership structures

Regulated businesses have to know who they’re dealing with. That’s simple enough when the customer is one company in one country, but when it’s a company owned by other companies spread across several countries, finding out who’s really behind it means registry lookups, spreadsheets and an awful lot of emails.

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

At a glance

A working HTML prototype that became the project’s single source of truth and helped secure investment from Vaiie’s parent company
Became a head start for the MVP
A canvas-based structure chart that got ownership mapping out of spreadsheets and Visio, and into the product

The problem

Ownership structures are where it gets difficult. They come in layers, cross borders, and the rules behind them keep changing. Compliance teams were mapping them by hand, across systems that didn’t talk to each other.

We had a proof of concept, but nothing that showed what the finished product should look like. So there were plenty of good ideas, all pulling in slightly different directions.

The solution

1. Outgrowing the proof of concept

I worked alongside a product manager, with compliance specialists to call on when we needed them. Together we took the design from wireframes to high-fidelity mockups. The proof of concept kept improving, but every change took too long to make, and we started losing momentum.

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 use

I built a component library in Fractal, a tool for assembling screens from reusable parts, and used it to create a working HTML prototype. The product manager and I could now turn ideas around quickly and validate them with compliance specialists as we went.

With a product this complex, it also meant the board and marketing could finally see what we were building. Clicking through something that behaved like the real product made their feedback a lot sharper.

The prototype became the single source of truth for the project. It helped secure internal investment from Jersey Post to expand the team, and stayed in use until they hired engineers in-house.

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. A head start for the MVP

When the new in-house engineers arrived, they rebuilt the product using the prototype as a reference for how it should look and work. I stayed on to design anything new, working from a Figma component library.

4. Getting ownership out of Visio

Firms were already drawing ownership diagrams in spreadsheets or Visio, completely separate from the system holding the data, so every change meant updating both.

We built each onboarding around a piece of business, with its own dossier for every company and person involved, and brought the ownership diagram into the product as a canvas-based structure chart. Users added entities straight onto the chart, and it flagged any risk or missing data right where they were looking.

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.