Pricing Modernization:
Modernizing a 30-Year-Old Pricing Platform

A complex operational system redesign focused on clarity, auditability, and cross-year analysis of financial data.

Summary

A large enterprise financial services company was running its core pricing operations on a system built thirty years earlier. I led the UX design for its replacement — a new pricing platform built to do everything the legacy system couldn't, while staying accurate enough to be trusted at market close, every single day.

The legacy platform still worked, but only through heavy manual updates and workarounds layered on a brittle, hard-to-extend architecture. New asset types, including crypto, didn't fit its assumptions at all, and every attempt to extend it risked breaking something else. The business needed to reduce manual load on analysts without introducing risk into a process where being wrong at market close has real financial consequences.

My Role

I design for a large enterprise financial services company, sitting between the business side and engineering so that what happens on the back end can actually be delivered on the front end. On this project, I led UX end-to-end — discovery, workflow design, screen design, and the handoff details that keep a design intact once it reaches development.

Role: Senior Enterprise UX Designer- Pricing Modernization Platform
Timeline: April 2024 - January 2026
Project / Division: Pricing Modernization

The Goal & The Work

Discovery Over Documentation.

There was no formal research phase, so I sat directly with the analysts, reviewers, and traders who touch pricing every day and had them walk me through how they actually get the job done — not how a requirements document assumed they worked. That distinction changed the design at nearly every level: exceptions aren't all the same shape, and treating them like they are would have made the new platform slower than the one it replaced. A corporate action exception needs one-by-one review; a mortgage-backed securities exception, when hundreds of pools break for the same reason, needs to be cleared in bulk. The design had to support both in the same screen family.

Designing For Judgement, Not Just Data Entry

I designed a status model built around simple icons and color so an analyst can tell at a glance whether a price is pending, approved, or rejected — and iterated on that system directly with business stakeholders. For price changes, I built a maker-checker approval workflow, where one person proposes a change and a second independently confirms it, with clear visual indicators for anything awaiting review. For cases where automated pricing sources came up short, I designed a fair value flow that gives analysts a clear, defensible path to make and document a judgment call.

Consolidating What Was Scattered

Consolidating what was scattered. Legacy pricing screens were spread across different views, which slowed down day-to-day vendor verification. I consolidated them into a single tabbed view with a date picker, so side-by-side comparisons between old and new data could happen in one place—a small change that restored real-time analytics that analysts had quietly been losing to extra clicks.

Pushing Back When It Mattered

There was real pressure at times to simply lift and shift—copy the legacy screens into a new shell without rethinking them. I pushed back directly: a system that does less than what people already have isn't an upgrade; it's a liability with a fresh coat of paint. Where requirements were thin or undocumented, I used the design work itself, along with direct documentation in Jira and meeting notes, to surface the gaps and get decisions made and written down.

Summary Outcomes

The new pricing platform launched, replacing the legacy system as the division's system of record. It shipped with capabilities the old architecture never supported at any point in its thirty-year run, including linked and swap pricing, FX rates, digital crypto rates, and a manager proposal review workflow.

The clearest measure of impact came from the closing room process: what used to take roughly two hours now takes about twenty minutes — the difference between a process that fits comfortably inside a business day and one that doesn't.

The bigger lesson carried forward: modernization has to mean more functionality, not just a fresher coat of paint on the same limitations. Sitting with the people actually doing the work, instead of trusting a documented process nobody had validated in years, is what kept this platform from becoming a more polished version of the same problem.

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