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From one feature, to an acquired platform.

Banks are required to prove their financial crime controls work. Cable was the first to automate that proof, but couldn't sell it. So it went out free, in exchange for feedback. I took that insight and shaped it into a product banks paid for.

0 → 1POC, TO SUITE

1 → 2flagships

10built features

$0 → PaidFREE, TO FIRST SALE

Founding Designer. The whole product surface, from a single feature to a compliance suite. Jul 2021 to Oct 2022, remote UK.

diagnosis

Burdened by feedback.

Proving financial crime controls work is an old job, expensively outsourced to consultants or done manually in house. Cable's pilot users based their feedback on their own work, translating it into what they thought the software should do, and with no references anywhere, that translation landed poorly as engineering requirements.

So the product answered everything and solved nothing, which is a fundamental product design problem. It tested a bank's controls automatically and recorded what followed: the accounts, the reviewers, the decisions, creating a Paper Trail. That single feature was the anchor, and the feedback anchored there too. Instead of building around it, they built on top of it. Drowning it.

strategy

Two steps forward.

Undoing that took one decision at a time, in the order engineering could afford. The first move was giving that feature the space it deserved on screen: a home page, a Paper Trail page, and a dependable list of account IDs where the controls are run. It became a real feature, with room to build around it instead of on top of it.

The other half was reading the feedback for their underlying needs, instead of shipping them as direct inputs. Once the product made sense on its own terms, users had something to measure against: they stopped narrating their own steps and started asking for outcomes.

growth

10 steps forward.

With real problems to build against, I could grow the product with purpose, spotting opportunities and articulating them into features we could ship. It became a suite: eleven features strong, with a second flagship in Oversight, a bird's eye view for sponsor banks running the same checks on the fintechs riding their charter, one interface, different data.

Eventually the suite ended up where the single feature had started, burdened and short of air. Fast iteration, the cost of opportunity, had strained the original structure and its metaphors. Another opening, this one not from users: a chance to take a foundational set of features and turn it into the industry's benchmark.

outcome

Standard. Acquired.

I finished the redesign right around the time we made our first sale, turning our pilot partner into our first client. The product was now fully featured and mature enough to earn its keep. The hard work paid off: three more clients followed on the heels of that first deal, carrying Cable from the UK to the US.

It kept growing, past 50 banks and fintechs, becoming a standard in the industry it was helping create. It was acquired by Synctera in 2026.