Scaling a Startup's Spend Control Platform to U.S. Bank's Credit Ecosystem
Product highlights
The impact of our work:
🚀 Launched to 472k small business customers
We achieved product-market fit, helping business owners manage growing teams and hundreds of monthly expenses.
🔒 Secured 122M transactions with spend controls
Businesses trust our tool to issue expense cards safely—preventing fraud while earning rewards and building credit.
🔁 Shifted product architecture from debit to credit
We evolved from a simple transaction tool to a full credit system—managing balances, interest, and fraud. A new product!
Some accomplishments I'm proud of:
🧠 Driving strategyLed design strategy, empowering leadership and roadmap decisions with workshops and feature iteration.
⚙️ Establishing a design systemEstablished a design system, enabling our small team to rapidly match the bank’s customer experience.
🔎 Performing user researchI ran a series of moderated studies and click tests, gauging feature interest, usability, and identifying new product directions.
🤝 Nurturing developer partnershipsRefined designer-developer handoff, establishing process in a time of intense growth.
📈 Building partnerships with salesI equipped sales managers with training materials, increasing customer onboarding.
Example iteration
Establishing a design system
Creating a custom employee card
Spend dashboard + reporting
Routing employee requests
Takeaways
Growing with a startup from 30 people to being acquired by a bank of 77,000 is a wacky experience, as far as SaaS development goes. You wear a lot of hats, work a lot of nights, and ultimately learn one thing: no matter how many customers you have or how large the company is, relationship-building is absolutely critical.
In my time scaling Bento within U.S. Bank, I performed user research, concepted new features, produced motion design, and even did QA testing.
All of this was empowered by my relationships with engineers who found efficient ways to implement my ideas, and the buy-in I got from stakeholders to make those ideas happen.
This long-term project greatly expanded my design technique, interpersonal skill, and general ability to deal with ambiguity and change. I look forward to more!
