At the time I lived there, Myanmar was primarily a cash-based society with only around 30% of the population regularly using banks. Remittances and cash-in-cash-out (CICO) services were the highest-priority touchpoints.

Emerging market finance is my favorite space to work in, so when my friend and frequent colleague, Lauren Serota invited me to build and lead a UX team at Yoma Bank in Yangon, Myanmar (Burma), I was quick to say yes.

I was super excited to see J.P. Morgan and Blackrock’s public announcement about their on-chain collateral management pilot.

I worked on the interface for the initial pilot of this product during my time with J.P. Morgan Onyx—the company’s blockchain-focused division. This particular project solved a major (and expensive) painpoint for complex trading organizations: collateral management.

High-frequency investors managing large portfolios need to maintain collateral for their leveraged positions (usually risk-free assets like bonds). Each day as the market value of their portfolios change, they need to increase or decrease the collateral that backs those positions. This collateral management task requires hundreds of people who set values for assets, manage yields on them, and move them back and forth between different custodians.

Onboarding to Cryptocurrency was a human-centric report I led with researchers from the Crypto Research and Design lab. in the report, we focused on the human side of what it was like to onboard to crypto through two key frameworks and three example vignettes from the field.

Read the full report →

Onboarding is outside the interface.

It is critical for product designers to understand that onboarding to a new technology requires a mental shift that happens outside of app interfaces. Onboarding of new financial technologies has a heavy social element. We explore several real-life examples of this in our report.