1.2M Adoptions

American Express Market Foundation:

Redesigning Global Card Applications, Driving 1.2M+ Adoptions

Hero image of a credit card application journey
A modern, compliant credit card application experience — scaled globally.

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

Role: Senior UX Architect
Team: PMs, Regional Stakeholders, Legal, Risk, Engineering
Tools: Figma, Sketch, InVision, Miro, Confluence, Jira, Stickies
Outcome: 1.2M+ adoptions, 20+ market launches, 15–30% conversion gains, 40% faster delivery

The Challenge

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

Key complexity included:

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

My Role

As Senior UX Architect, I led:

  • Discovery across markets, regulations, and systems
  • UX flows, journey maps, and prototypes
  • Stakeholder and PM collaboration in 6+ regions
  • Product story mapping and backlog creation
  • Agile delivery and launch planning

Discovery

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 + stakeholder workshops
  • Regulatory reviews with legal and compliance
  • Existing app data synthesis and analytics baselines

Journey Mapping

Identified shared UX building blocks and regional deviations.

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 hueristics 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.

Design & Modularity

Prototyped wireframes, components, and logic flows with a focus on repeatability + 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 langauge and layout framework.

System included:

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

Implementation & Rollout

Designed the launch strategy and delivery framework to roll out country by country.

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

Plan included:

  • Phased market sequencing by complexity
  • Risk mitigation + rollback protocol
  • Rollout dashboards and QA pipelines

Outcomes

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

Lessons & Impact

This transformation created a scalable model for international delivery.

What I learned:

  • Discovery frameworks are a force multiplier
  • Modular thinking accelerates delivery and iteration
  • Collaboration across functions demands structure, not chaos
  • User testing in context reveals blockers early

Want results like this?

Let’s bring velocity, structure, and clarity to your next product.

Let’s talk

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