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What if portfolio management wasn't just for the ultra-wealthy? I led design, research, branding, and developer tooling for a fintech platform democratizing goal-based financial planning.
Role
Founding Designer & PM
Model
Goal-based Advisory
Domain
Wealth Management
Status
Pre-launch (Beta)
50+
User Interviews
800+
Survey Responses
2
Personas Defined
20+
Design System Components
20+
User Testing Sessions
1
Open-Source Plugin
Professional financial advisory was locked behind a ₹50 lakh minimum. That excluded millions of people who needed it most.
In India, portfolio managers and wealth advisors only work with HNIs and UHNIs—clients who maintain a minimum portfolio of ₹50,00,000. But what about the affluent professionals in Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities? What about high-earning private sector employees who don't qualify for traditional wealth management but still have complex financial goals?
These people were left to blindly copy someone else's portfolio on Twitter or Reddit, with no understanding of when to rebalance, when to redeem, or how to align investments with their actual life goals. Because here's what gets missed: you don't invest money to let it sit forever. You invest it to spend it—on a house, a wedding, your child's education, a car.
Qwark was built to bridge that gap. A subscription-based fintech platform that provides goal-based financial planning—what we call "journeys"—for people who were underserved by the traditional wealth management industry.
Designing a platform that makes professional financial advisory accessible to people who were previously locked out.
My job was to translate Qwark's goal-based advisory model into a product that felt approachable, trustworthy, and easy to use. That meant running deep user research to understand how our target audience actually thought about money and investing. It meant building a design system that could scale with a growing fintech product. It meant rebranding from Unmaze to Qwark to position us correctly in the advisory space.
I also designed the flows for KYC onboarding, account aggregation, portfolio setup, and goal tracking—then tested them with real users to see what worked and what didn't. Along the way, I built tooling to improve our design-to-development handoff.
For critical integrations like CAMS's KYC and Account Aggregator, I was the product POC—negotiating pricing with vendors, diving into their developer documentation to understand their APIs, and writing comprehensive PRDs. Those PRDs served two audiences: myself (to design the UX/UI flows) and my developer team (to implement the technical integration). It meant wearing both hats at once.
50+ interviews, 800+ surveys, 2 personas
M3-inspired tokens, Figma variables, component library
Core flows, wireframes, prototypes, iterations
Complete rebrand from Unmaze to Qwark
Open-source Figma plugin for token handoff
Vendor negotiations, PRD authoring, KYC/AA integrations, analytics
The part most portfolios skip: the iteration.
After finishing the initial designs, I didn't hand them off and move on. I recruited 20 people and watched them try to use what we'd built.
Some flows made sense in Figma but confused real users. A few UI decisions that looked clean actually created friction. And some of my assumptions about how people would behave turned out to be wrong.
So I redesigned the UX flows. Not because something went wrong, but because that's how you build a product that works. Test it. See what breaks. Fix it.
Advisory built around real life goals, delivered through a subscription model.
Qwark's model is built around journeys—financial goals with clear timelines. Emergency funds. House down payments. Weddings. Children's education. Vacations. For each journey, we advise on asset allocation, sector selection, and regular rebalancing based on the user's risk profile and timeline.
Unlike traditional portfolio managers who charge a percentage of AUM or require massive minimums, Qwark operates on a monthly or quarterly subscription. That means financial advisory becomes accessible to people earning well but not yet wealthy—the segment the industry had ignored.
My job was to design the entire user experience: how someone sets up their first journey, links their existing investments via account aggregation, receives rebalancing recommendations, and tracks progress toward their goals. The product had to feel as trustworthy as a traditional wealth manager, but without the gatekeeping.
Each area of work has its own detailed case study. Pick what interests you.
What I delivered across all workstreams.
Established complete brand identity (Unmaze → Qwark rebrand)
Conducted 50+ user interviews & analyzed 800+ survey responses
Defined 2 core personas that shaped product direction & roadmap
Built scalable design system using Figma variables (M3-inspired)
Developed open-source Figma plugin for developer handoff (MIT license)
Product POC for KYC/AA integrations: vendor pricing, API docs review, PRD authoring
Conducted 20+ user testing sessions, iterating UX flows based on feedback
Owned product metrics strategy and analytics setup
Designed complete product from 0-to-1 for goal-based financial advisory
What building a fintech product from zero taught me about design and user trust.
People are wary of new financial products, especially when money is involved. Every design decision had to build credibility—clear language, transparent processes, and never hiding complexity behind false simplicity.
20 user tests before writing production code caught problems that would have cost weeks in development. Better to find friction in Figma than in a sprint.
Taking what works from M3 and leaving the rest wasn't cutting corners. It was right-sizing complexity for a beta-stage product.
Negotiating with vendors, reading API documentation, and writing PRDs for developers taught me to think beyond pixels. Understanding the business and technical constraints made me a better designer.
The Variable Mode Injector plugin started as frustration with an actual workflow problem. Building for real pain, not hypothetical use cases, makes better tools.
Each spoke above goes deeper into a specific area of the work. Or if you're interested in the technical side, check out the open-source plugin I built.