In January 2024 I got the kind of brief designers dream about and lose sleep over: a brand-new fintech product, no existing design foundation, and five very different audiences who all needed retirement planning to feel simple. Here's how we built it — and how it reached $1M in assets under management within a year of launch.
My role
UX/UI Lead at SPAN Technology Services
Team
3 designers + BAs, PMs, eng, QA
Timeline
Jan 2024 – Jun 2026
Platform
Web · native mobile · website
Tools
Figma · FigJam · tldraw · Claude
WealthRabbit was funded by investors Jason Ackerman (CPA) and Adam Ackerman (financial advisor at BNA CPA) to digitize retirement account management — SIMPLE IRA, SEP IRA, Traditional, Roth and Backdoor Roth — for employers, employees, individual investors, accountants and an internal operations team.
Competitors like Fidelity, Betterment, Human Interest, Vanguard and Charles Schwab didn't offer a fully digital solution — and none had a real accountant-management portal. That gap became our sharpest edge: a platform where a CPA could onboard clients, make contributions and manage portfolios for every account they serve.
My job: make complex financial tasks easy to understand, navigate and complete with confidence — for users with wildly different levels of financial knowledge.
The end-to-end design experience — website, web application, native app flows and all five portals. Research, competitor analysis, personas, information architecture, user flows, wireframes, high-fidelity design, prototypes, the design system, and design review of every shipped feature.
BAs analysed requirements and ran sprint formation; PMs and the investors set business priorities; developers and QA shaped feasibility in refinement sessions. I was the one designer accountable for WealthRabbit in the agile cycle, working in 2-week sprints, 5–6 sprints per wave.
01
Sprint formation. BAs bring the analysis — a new feature, an enhancement, an accountant pain point or an emergency fix — and we finalise the sprint plan together with stakeholders, QA, developers and marketing.
02
Low-fi first. I work with the BA on a low-fidelity prototype — a rough mock-up that makes the idea arguable before it's expensive.
03
Refinement. Developers and QA pressure-test effort and feasibility. If the flow needs another pass, we iterate until the solution holds.
04
High-fi on the system. Once requirements settle, I build the high-fidelity prototype on our design system — reusable components, consistent patterns — and take it through stakeholder review.
05
Handoff & design review. Front-end developers convert the approved design; after build, it comes back to me for a design-consistency review — every scenario, every state — before QA.
SIMPLE and SEP IRA plans for small businesses — SECURE 2.0 Act benefits, a Form 8881 startup-credits calculator, employee management, and payroll integrations (Square, Gusto, QuickBooks, ADP, Paylocity and more via Finch) with auto-run contributions.
Where participants monitor the retirement account their employer set up — contributions, balances and plan benefits, without the jargon.
Traditional, Roth and Backdoor Roth IRAs for self-directed investors — with ten investment portfolios (5 core, 5 crypto) powered by a Bitwise integration.
The differentiator. CPAs invite clients to onboard, make contributions and select portfolios on their behalf, add team members with role-based access, and match client data through a Karbon integration.
The newest addition — advisors share revenue on their clients' accounts and offer modified portfolio options tailored to them.
The internal admin console where the ops team manages IRA accounts flowing in from every portal — exception handling included.
At the start of the product I created an end-to-end design system — refined as we grew, with components added when genuinely needed and accessibility guidelines built in. Consistency had to survive multiple roles, multiple portals, multiple user models and multiple devices.
From 2025, we updated the system to be AI-adaptable — using Claude and Figma MCP so component creation, documentation and exploration run faster while human review keeps the bar. Trust details got equal care: 2FA, device-based authentication factors, and careful patterns for how amounts, categories and financial states are displayed.
Version one went live with the employer and employee portals on SIMPLE IRA. Over the following year, the major work I designed included:
$1M
Reached within the first year of launch.
6
Employer, employee, advisor and admin — all consistent.
10
Five core and five crypto, built to compare at a glance.
Oct '24
Nine months from kickoff to live product.
“The UI is very clean and intuitive — the accountant portal is a really good experience for managing our clients.”
“Gunalan does a fantastic job creating the design system — and the product came out really well.”
I came into this new to the domain and left fluent in IRAs, rebalance engines, contributions, AUM, asset allocation, crypto portfolios, revenue models and payment integrations. More importantly, I learned how to convert an investor's requirement into a screen a first-time user can trust — how to show amounts, when to disclose, where security has to be visible and where it should stay quiet.
The accountant portal is the part I'm proudest of: a genuinely complex business problem — one professional managing many accounts with a team — resolved into a flow people describe as a positive experience.