Simplifying the complexity of private equity through seamless portfolio experience
Introduction
Private markets have usually been a space reserved for big institutional players. Smaller investors have had far fewer opportunities to access these products, not only because of regulation, but also because the systems and processes around them were complex and difficult to navigate. Titanbay’s goal was to help change that by building the fund structures, platform infrastructure, and digital journeys needed for private banks and wealth managers to offer private market investments to a wider group of clients. To do that, the experience itself had to be simplified. Before Titanbay, reaching an investment could involve multiple teams, manual steps, and unclear handoffs across the process. The work on the platform focused on digitising that journey so it could become more understandable, more efficient, and easier to scale for both distributors and investors.
My role
My role was to work across product, technology, business, and customer needs to help define the journeys required to digitise these investment products. I used design as a way to connect teams, visualise concepts, and make complex ideas easier to understand and discuss. This helped create a shared space for collaboration, while improving the user experience by shaping journeys that were more intuitive, clearer, and more valuable for users.
Portfolio restructure
Goal
The goal of this project was not only to improve the experience, but also to create the right conditions for scale. As a wider team, we wanted to make onboarding and investment journeys clearer, support investment products on the platform, reduce operational friction, and help the business grow AUM through a stronger digital experience and the product structures being shaped across teams.
The work covered several areas that needed to be digitised and improved:
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Client onboarding
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Portfolio restructure
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Product digitisation for Evergreen and closed-ended funds
For this case study, I’m focusing mainly on the platform experience, while also showing part of the digital onboarding journey. This helps give a clearer picture of the wider scope of the work and the different moving parts involved.
Research
Research needed to go beyond the screens. As a team, we had to step back and look at the full ecosystem around private market investing: who was involved, what products were being offered, and what operational complexity sat behind each investment journey. It was not just about improving one flow, but about understanding how the platform could support different investment products, different client groups, and the teams behind them.
Through interviews and ongoing collaboration, the product, sales, design, and support teams worked closely with a pilot client to understand how they were using the system, where the pain points were, and what was making the journey harder than it needed to be. This gave us a clearer view of where the experience needed to become simpler, more transparent, and easier to scale.
Alongside this, I supported user research and contributed to planning the transition between the old and new libraries, helping design and engineering continue working smoothly as the platform evolved for future clients.
To make sense of the opportunity, we split research across four areas: business, product, tech, and users. This helped us understand not only the experience we wanted to create, but also the wider ecosystem, constraints, and needs shaping it.
Business
Tech
Product
Users
Findings
Through regular conversations with operations, legal, product, support, and the pilot client, the team built a clearer picture of where digitisation could create the most value. The investigation was less about redesigning isolated screens and more about understanding how the full service worked: what information was needed, who owned each step, where duplication existed, and how the platform could simplify a fragmented process. A recurring theme was the need to standardise what could be standardised, reduce manual handling, and create one clearer source of truth for data, reporting, and operational decisions.
Client and user needs
Client and user-facing discussions, a clear pattern emerged: people needed more clarity, not more information. Relationship managers needed to quickly understand what a fund was, what kind of product it was, the next deadline, the key terms, and what action they needed to take for their client. If those details were hard to find or confusing, the risk was not only a poor experience but missed investment windows
There was also a strong need for better portfolio visibility. Users wanted to understand positions, performance, lock-up periods, redemptions, and returns in a way that felt clear and useful, not buried in dense tables or fragmented data. This reinforced the idea that portfolio visibility was not a secondary feature — it was a core part of trust and control in the experience.
Data, integrations, and reporting
A major finding across teams was that the ecosystem was fragmented and highly dependent on external services. Custodians, transfer agents, wealth platforms, and reporting platforms all handled data differently, and not every partner was ready to work through APIs. That meant the team needed to understand each external service’s data model, ingestion requirements, and operational expectations before defining a scalable platform approach.
This led to a very practical conclusion: the platform needed to reduce duplication and become a more reliable source of truth. Reporting, order tracking, and communication could not depend on scattered spreadsheets, repeated data entry, or multiple disconnected systems. The platform had to centralise the key information needed to support continuity across teams and external partners.
Product
On the platform, investors and wealth managers needed to feel more empowered to follow portfolio performance over time. Part of the work focused on making positions, returns, lock-up periods, redemptions, and investment status easier to track and understand, so users could feel more in control and better informed throughout the investment lifecycle.
On the onboarding side, the journey needed to be both trackable and efficient. The experience had to support the collection of the right data and documents without becoming a blocker for operational checks or verification. This was important to reduce friction, improve transparency across the process, and help users move more smoothly towards investment readiness.
Operations
We found that digitising the journey meant understanding the full operational process behind an investment: what information was needed, who created and approved accounts, how orders were aggregated, and what needed to be tracked from request through to confirmation. Manual handling was still common, so the platform needed to reduce effort, improve visibility, and make statuses and deadlines easier to manage.
Legal
On the legal side, a key part of the discovery was understanding how onboarding and investment readiness actually worked across multiple services. This included how new accounts were created, what client data needed to be captured, which documents had to be collected or generated, where KYC and AML sat, who had signing authority, and what legal agreements needed to be in place before an order could be submitted. The process also depended on fund prospectuses, subscription documents, dealing terms, payment instructions, and settlement requirements being clearly understood and reflected in the service design.
Research summary
This diagram brings together the main learning gathered during my time at Titanbay through research, workshops, design reviews, and cross-functional conversations. Rather than showing every detail, it helps summarise the areas that mattered most in shaping the platform and the order in which they needed to be tackled.
Over time, it became clear that the challenge was not only about improving screens. It was about understanding the full private markets ecosystem, the people involved, the operational dependencies behind each journey, and the gaps that were slowing down access to investment. Working across product, operations, legal, support, client-facing teams, and pilot clients helped build a clearer picture of where the biggest friction sat and what the platform needed to solve first.
Onboarding came first because without investment readiness, nothing else could move. Clients needed a journey that was clear, trackable, and efficient, but in reality the process was often slowed down by manual operational and compliance steps. Document collection, verification, and approvals could take weeks or even months, creating friction for everyone involved. One of the key opportunities was to digitize that process, reduce friction, improve how data and documents were handled, and help the journey move forward in days rather than weeks, without unnecessary blockers.
Investment Flow followed because once onboarding was complete, Wealth Managers and Investors needed a simpler and more reliable way to move from product understanding to action. In a space where deadlines and cut-off dates matter, reducing friction here was critical.
Portfolio & Reporting became the next priority because the experience could not stop once an investment was made. Investors and wealth managers needed visibility of positions, performance, redemptions, and portfolio activity over time to feel informed and in control.
Product details were essential because users needed to understand what they were investing in. The research showed that information had to be clearer, more relevant, and easier to access at the right moment.
Fund marketplace reflected the need for a stronger discovery layer, helping wealth managers and distributors explore opportunities and connect clients to the right products through one more joined-up experience.
Compliance sat across all of these areas. While shown last in the sequence, it was an enabling layer throughout the journey, helping ensure that the right checks, documents, and rules supported the service behind the scenes.
Parallel design workstream: platform restructure
Alongside the service and product discovery work with the teams, there was also a parallel design work stream focused on improving the overall platform experience. As a designer, I needed to make sure the platform itself could support these evolving journeys in a way that felt clear, consistent, and scalable.
This meant looking beyond individual flows and addressing the broader experience across the product. The platform restructure focused on creating a stronger foundation for usability, navigation, design consistency, and future growth, so that new journeys and products could be introduced into a more coherent experience rather than added onto an already fragmented one.
The work included:
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Heuristic evaluation of the existing platform to identify issues across usability, navigation, accessibility, and consistency
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Navigation analysis and redesign to simplify orientation, reduce cognitive load, and create a clearer hierarchy between platform, portfolio, and page-level navigation
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Rebranding and white-label alignment to support a cleaner, more modern, and brand-light experience while still allowing client brand recognition through subtle adaptation
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Component library transition and alignment using PrimeVue as the base layer to improve consistency, scalability, and implementation speed
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Establishing design system foundations and rules across layouts, spacing, typography, colour, responsiveness, accessibility, and interaction behaviours
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Improving responsive behaviour so the platform could scale more naturally across desktop, tablet, and mobile
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Strengthening accessibility through color contrast checks, clearer hierarchy, more readable navigation states, and more predictable interactions
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Optimising content and layout to make better use of space in data-heavy views such as tables, analytics, and portfolio information
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Simplifying the visual language to create a calmer, more intentional, and less intrusive experience focused on usability rather than heavy branding
Product principles
Part of this project was to define a set of product principles, so the team could design and build towards the same shared goals. These principles helped create alignment across product, design, and engineering, while giving the platform a clearer direction as it evolved.
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Simple — clear journeys, reduced friction, and easier navigation
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Scalable — able to support evolving products, users, and business needs
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Innovative — using digital solutions to simplify a traditionally complex space
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Intuitive — designed to feel clear and usable for both asset managers and investors
Platform branding
The branding sessions and platform insights helped define a more minimal and less intrusive visual direction for the Platform. Rather than applying branding as decoration, the work focused on making the product feel clearer, calmer, and more consistent. The aim was to reduce visual noise, improve navigation, and help users better understand where they were within the Platform, especially when moving between portfolios and different areas of the experience.
This direction informed the wider restructuring work, including heuristic evaluation, navigation analysis, rebrand alignment, design library transition, and the creation of design rules to ensure consistency across the product. The outcome was a platform experience that felt more coherent, easier to navigate, and better aligned with the needs of wealth managers and investors.
AI-supported session prep and synthesis to turn team insights into actionable platform outcomes.
By combining a focused team off-site with AI-supported synthesis, we turned workshop inputs into clear platform outcomes within two days. This reduced the synthesis timeline from around a week to one focused day, while preserving human judgement in the final recommendations.
Planning the design transition across old and new platform experiences
This diagram helped reframe the platform restructure from a set of isolated feature discussions into a connected design system and product ecosystem challenge.
The platform was evolving while the rebrand and design library transition were also in progress. As a result, some areas still relied on older components and patterns, while newer screens followed the updated visual direction. This created visible and structural inconsistencies, but also gave us a clear opportunity to plan the transition deliberately rather than fixing screens one by one.
Mapping the ecosystem helped identify where the experience was fragmented, where users were losing context, where design decisions needed alignment, and where the design library needed to support a more consistent platform experience. It also helped prioritise the areas that needed design focus first.
Overall experience
Working at Titanbay taught me a lot about what it means to design in a fast-paced environment while being the only designer in the team. It pushed me to think beyond screens and work more strategically across product, technology, business, and operations. It also reminded me that complex problems cannot be solved all at once. They need a clear vision, shared direction, and the contribution of multiple disciplines working together.
One of the things I valued most at Titanbay was the respect for different areas of expertise. The best progress happened when each team trusted the others’ discipline, rather than trying to prove a point by stepping into someone else’s space. That created a healthier way of working and made collaboration much stronger. It also gave space for experimentation, which was a big part of the culture. Teams were encouraged to explore, test ideas, and make use of new AI tools, which helped speed up thinking, prototyping, and problem-solving.
As a designer, I was exposed to fields far beyond design itself. I had the chance to work with very smart people who were generous with their knowledge, helping me understand the world of private equity and the operational complexity behind it. That experience helped me grow not only as a designer, but as someone able to structure ideas in complex environments, stay comfortable with ambiguity, and move work forward even when everything could not be solved at once.
It also taught me that a certain level of chaos is natural when a product is evolving, especially in a space as complex as private markets. What matters is that the chaos is understood, controlled, planned, and communicated. When teams are aligned, when there is trust across disciplines, and when the work is moving towards a shared vision, that complexity becomes something you can shape rather than something that blocks progress.
AI is an amazing support tool, but it will not replace a designer. It does not understand all the small details that matter in a real experience: context, common sense, psychology, and how people actually behave. It can generate UI quickly, but those outputs still need design thinking, refinement, and human judgment. Its strength is in helping us move faster, explore ideas, and support the work, but it needs direction. AI can accelerate the process, but it should not do the thinking for us.