BenPay

OVerview

At BNY Mellon, I contributed as a Senior Product Designer on internal financial platforms used by operational teams in a highly regulated enterprise environment. The work focused on improving usability and consistency across complex workflows, modernizing legacy systems, and elevating clarity for end users.

BenPay supports the end-to-end setup and administration of benefit payment programs, enabling users to define client structures, payment groups, and participant details that drive downstream processing. Because these configurations directly affect financial outcomes, the platform prioritizes correctness, traceability, and consistency across workflows. I was brought onto the project to help transition BenPay toward a more modern, secure platform within a tight timeline, addressing inherited security concerns while working within the constraints of an established system.

Challenge

The challenge was to translate ambiguity and system complexity into interfaces that felt coherent, predictable, and usable.

The platform ecosystem supported mission-critical workflows that handled sensitive financial data with zero tolerance for error. Users operated within:

• Complex, data-rich systems built on legacy codebases

• Inconsistent patterns across interfaces

• High cognitive load tasks with real consequences

• Regulatory and compliance constraints that shaped design decisions

My Role

As a Lead Product Designer I was responsible for:

• Partnering closely with product management, engineering, and business stakeholders to define design goals and priorities

• Establishing consistent patterns and interaction models that aligned with enterprise expectations

• Driving design direction across features while balancing scalability and technical feasibility

• Planning and leading user testing to validate workflows, reduce ambiguity, and ensure designs supported real-world decision-making

• Advocating for accessibility and inclusive practices in workflows that needed broad user reach

I worked across the product lifecycle from early conceptualization to final delivery.

Approach & Focus

My approach centered on improving clarity and correctness across complex setup and management workflows by addressing both interaction design and underlying information architecture. A key focus was rethinking how information was contained, surfaced, and searched, so users could reliably locate and verify the data they needed at each step. This work required balancing improved usability with the realities of a legacy technology stack, designing solutions that were achievable within existing constraints while still moving the system toward greater consistency and coherence.

Outcomes

• Enhanced internal design consistency and reduced cognitive load for users

• Clearer and more predictable workflows in critical operational tools

• Better alignment among product, design, and engineering during transitions from legacy to modern interfaces

• Foundation laid for future design system improvements and scalable patterns

(Specific metrics are confidential but reflected improvements in internal feedback and design maturity.)

Tools & Methods

• Figma — interface and pattern exploration
• Cross-functional collaboration and iterative reviews
• Usability heuristics and task flow refinement
• Component libraries aligned with enterprise patterns