American Express Market Foundation:

1.2M Adoptions

American Express Market Foundation:

Redesigning Global Card Applications, Driving 1.2M+ Adoptions

UX Architecture Design Systems Regulatory Compliance Scalable Design Agile Delivery
  • Figma
  • Sketch
  • InVision
  • Miro
  • Jira
  • Confluence
Project Summary

Redesigned international credit card application journeys across six markets, integrating a new risk engine, ensuring local compliance, and building a scalable, modular UX system that improved conversion and delivery speed.

My Role

  • Led UX architecture, discovery, and modular design system strategy
  • Created flows, journey maps, and prototypes
  • Aligned with stakeholders across product, risk, legal, and engineering for 20+ card products
  • Planned and supported phased rollout of application experiences

Hero image of a credit card application journey
A modern, compliant credit card application experience ready to scale globally.

“This program reset how we deliver international products. We built something scalable, flexible, and fast.”

Design Process

Discover & Define → Frame the Challenge → Design & Deliver

1. Discover & Define

The brief: Redesign international card application journeys across 20+ card products, six markets, while integrating with a new risk engine, maintaining local compliance, and creating a repeatable, scalable system — all without disrupting acquisition targets.

Key complexities:

  • Regulatory variation per market
  • UX inconsistencies and legacy sprawl
  • Deep stakeholder network (marketing, legal, tech, risk)
  • Need for modularity and reusability

To align stakeholders and uncover risk early, I built a structured discovery methodology used across markets:

Flow diagram showing journey and risk touchpoints
Example: mapped every journey, risk trigger, and regulatory requirement.

Approach included:

  • Market-specific templates and stakeholder workshops
  • Regulatory reviews with legal and compliance
  • Existing app data synthesis and analytics baselines

2. Frame the Challenge

Research revealed three core issues:

  • Inconsistent user journeys across regions
  • High regulatory overhead with little reuse
  • Slow time-to-market due to siloed tools and stakeholder misalignment

The task: Create a modular UX framework that could be reused globally but customized locally with consistent patterns, faster launches, and regulatory compliance.

3. Design & Deliver

We identified shared UX building blocks and regional deviations, mapping out complete end-to-end flows.

Whiteboard journey map
One of many whiteboard sessions mapping market-specific application steps.
The mass of whiteboards
Whiteboards used extensively to ensure team alignment and a shared understanding of scope.
Wall-based heuristics evaluation
Evaluating the existing journeys: taped to walls for team heuristics analysis and discussion.
Wall-based heuristics evaluation
Same session as above, showing breadth and detail of the session.
POD flow diagram
Flow diagram illustration screens, decision, and integration points for point of departure experience.

We prototyped wireframes, components, and logic flows with a focus on repeatability and local relevance.

UI architecture
A modular framework for design + dev, balancing reuse and flexibility.
Image of UIs
High fidelity mockups created with American Express design language and layout framework.

System included:

  • Conditional flows and rule-based layouts
  • Reusable component templates
  • Shared content management
  • Configurable integration logic

Launch & Iterate

I led the strategy and delivery framework to roll out market by market:

Monitoring UI tool
Monitoring UI used to manage phased rollout and validate regional readiness.

Launch plan included:

  • Sequenced market deployment by complexity
  • Risk mitigation and rollback protocols
  • Rollout dashboards and QA pipelines
20+ market launches across UK, HK, India, France, AU
15–30% conversion rate improvements
40% faster time-to-market for later launches
100% regulatory compliance
35% reduction in maintenance cost

What I learned:

  • Discovery frameworks are a force multiplier
  • Modular thinking accelerates delivery and iteration
  • Collaboration across functions demands structure
  • User testing in context reveals blockers early

Let’s talk

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