Dismantling fragmentation within a legacy banking ecosystem.

Context

The backbone of digital banking. And it was showing its age.

FIS is a global fintech leader that processes over $10.3 trillion annually across 34 billion+ transactions for 4,900+ financial institutions. Within FIS, my team operates in the Digital Banking portfolio, designing the admin, banker, and teller experiences that power day-to-day operations at local and regional banks across the country.

Flex Web Admin (FWA) is the configuration program at the center of that work. Bank administrators use it to manage customer accounts, assign permissions, configure transaction fees, and customize the banking experience for their clients. Flex web admin is foundational banking software and in early 2025, it had become a business liability.

The Problem

Two problems. Both needed to be named before either could be solved.

There was a user problem and a business problem. Treating them as one was part of why the tool had stagnated over the years.

The objective was straightforward to state and hard to execute: modernize FIS admin tooling to drive both user efficiency and business growth.

Discovery

We got to work grounding every product and design decision in research.

Before any design direction was set, we ran an accelerated discovery sprint to build a research-backed foundation. The team synthesized primary, secondary, and legacy research across a compressed timeline, mapping user requests and product debt against a competitive audit to define a clear prioritization for the reimagine.

Methods included qualitative interviews, competitive audits, heuristic and feature-level analysis, external workshop focus groups, user journey mapping, and an IA discovery workshop. We also synthesized prior UXR finding reports to avoid duplicating work that had already been done.

Four findings shaped everything that followed:

• 01 The tool is used while on the phone. The majority of web admin usage happens while an administrator is actively helping a customer. Speed and navigational clarity aren't nice-to-haves; they're load-bearing to the job.
• 02 Job titles vary; the work doesn't. Despite different role names across different banks, the vast majority of users are doing customer service functions. The tool wasn't designed around that shared reality.
• 03 A small number of tasks drives the majority of use. A handful of common customer requests account for most daily interactions. The IA prioritized none of them.
• 04 Manual workflows create unnecessary friction. The tool felt outdated and over-complicated because it was, requiring steps that had no reason to be manual, at the expense of users who were already multitasking.

These findings mapped directly to four design priorities that became the guiding principles for all work that followed: streamline the navigation, prioritize customer tasks, streamline common actions, and automate workflows wherever the system allowed it.

The Tension

Stakeholders wanted a UI refresh. We had to do more for users.

After discovery readouts, stakeholders pushed to pivot. The ask: focus solely on a UI refresh, update the visual styles, polish the primary pages, and ship. It was faster, lower-risk, and easier to sell internally.

While we wanted to support the effort of shipping improvements quickly, we knew that a visual refresh wouldn't fix the core experience issues. It wouldn't resolve the context-switching. It wouldn't address the navigational disorientation we'd just spent weeks documenting. Users would have a nicer-looking version of a fractured experience.

The business case for deeper investment was already in the data, sales attrition and lost partnerships were tied directly to the UX failures we'd surfaced. We needed to make that case clear and propose a path that gave stakeholders something concrete to commit to.

The solution was a phased approach. Starting with a Northstar vision gave stakeholders a picture of where we were going before asking them to fund the full investment. Phase 1 became a concrete, deliverable-backed commitment they could approve immediately with the longer-term roadmap visible and sequenced behind it.

The Work — Northstar

Project Athena: Building a vision worth building toward.

With stakeholder alignment secured on the phased approach, we launched a vision sprint anchored by a collaborative workshop. The goal was shared alignment before any design direction was locked, not a presentation to react to, but a working session to build from.

The workshop surfaced vision themes, mapped existing pain points, and used "How Might We" framing to open the design space. From there, the team moved into concept development and storyboarding to sketch what a unified admin experience could look like end-to-end.

The output was Project Athena — a Northstar vision for Flex Web Admin that consolidated fragmented admin dashboards and introduced AI-driven support tools into a single, cohesive experience. Following a series of internal roadshows, the team secured full executive buy-in to begin building the next-generation web platform.

The Work — Phase 1

Foundational changes that deliver immediate value and build toward the vision.

With the Northstar established and stakeholders aligned, Phase 1 focused on the IA, navigation, and design system work that would deliver real user impact while creating the infrastructure for everything ahead.