FINSYNC is a SaaS Platform that helps small businesses manage accounting, payroll, and payments—all in one platform. After two years designing on the FINSYNC Platform, I led the creation of the FINSYNC Impact Center—a hub connecting entrepreneurs with bankers, investors, accountants, and coaches to provide real-world support beyond software into personalized financial and strategic support.
Roles
Design Research, UI Design
Timeline
1 Year +
Tools
Figma, Figjam, Fullstory, Jira
Client
FINSYNC
Collaborators
1 Product Manager, 4 Developers
Problem:
Starting a business shouldn’t feel like flipping a coin, yet 50% of businesses don’t even make it five years. Why? Because the challenges they face need lending partnerships, experience, and connections to guide the way.
The Impact Center bridges financial professionals with entrepreneurs using the FINSYNC Platform. Entrepreneurs submit their business details and funding goals via the FINSYNC Platform, and the system matches them to the most relevant bankers and investors in the Impact Center.
2 Unique Products
1 Unified Network
At the beginning of 2024, FINSYNC introduced the AI Business Canvas and AI Business Plan—tools designed to help entrepreneurs define product-market fit, refine their strategy, and prepare investor-ready presentations. By integrating these insights with real-time financial data from our accounting platform, we unlocked a powerful way to showcase entrepreneurs’ true value and strengthen their pitches. For investors, this created world-class visibility into opportunities.
- Product-market fit
- Financial history, debts, credit, and loan requests
- Full transparency into cash flow and revenue
- Projected future growth metrics and earnings
All enabling investors to make confident, informed decisions while connecting seamlessly with the right entrepreneurs.
I see personas as similar to salt in a recipe — they’re not effective on their own, but when combined with the right supporting methods, they enhance the entire process. In our case, that support came from two key practices: summarizing interviews and creating role-based data sets.
The interviews helped capture the goals and pain points of the various roles we needed to design for, turning raw insights into relatable, human-centered archetypes. Meanwhile, the role-based data sets added structure to our Product Requirement Documents, ensuring each role’s specific needs were clearly defined and prioritized.
Throughout the design process, we actively iterated our prototypes with teammates who supported each user role. In collaborative calls that included both stakeholders and their clients, we were able to troubleshoot, gather feedback, and make critical course corrections.
We definitely missed the mark in some places and some key insights highlighted from this hands-on testing included:
- Investors were open to making smaller investments than expected
- Community Organizations preferred using their own training content over our internal offerings
- Bankers wanted a simplified onboarding process where clients could self-enroll via a link
Early wireframe presentations helped us pivot away from several flawed assumptions, saving both time and resources. With a new product in the works, I was also tasked with pushing design quality forward—delivering high-fidelity mocks that tested light/dark modes and laid groundwork for a refreshed design system.
Saying “no” to a customer is costly. It wastes expensive leads, weakens relationships, and leaves businesses without the financing they need to grow.
We saw an opportunity. With our network of lenders (spanning government programs, collateral-based loans, and angel investors), we empowered providers to turn rejection into redirection. By referring clients to better-fit partners, providers can keep the relationship alive, ensure customer success, and still capture value through third-party commissions.
What began as a focused MVP quickly grew into a platform that outperformed expectations. By expanding our feature set to give lenders unmatched flexibility, we attracted over 1,000 financial partners in the first six months. One of our largest partners achieved preferred SBA lender status, and investment partnerships opened a new channel of user acquisition, more than doubling the customer base of our accounting platform.
-That the best ideas aren't all ways epiphanies, and often come from simply listening to people putting in the work to get through all the minutia and other data until a discovery is born.
Other Projects: