Global Business Account & Spend Management
A product exploration designing a unified financial hub for global startups. Targeting the friction points between multi-currency accounts, international payroll, and employee corporate cards.
Situation: The Fragmented Finance Stack
A typical modern startup operates globally from day one. They might be incorporated in the US (Delaware), hire developers in Poland, and sell software to customers in the UK.
To manage this, they duct-tape together traditional bank accounts, high-fee international wire services, and separate corporate card providers. This fragmentation leads to extreme friction for the CFO: hidden FX markup fees, slow vendor payments, and days lost exporting CSVs at month-end to reconcile expenses.
The "Frankenstein" Setup
Traditional Bank
Holds USD. Charges 3% FX markup and $45 per international wire. Takes 3 days to settle.
Standalone Corporate Card
Not connected to the main ledger. Requires manual pre-funding. Receipt chasing via Slack.
P2P FX Service
Used strictly for paying international contractors to avoid the bank's wire fees.
Task: The Unified Treasury Vision
This concept exploration aims to design a unified platform that consolidates receiving money globally, managing FX at mid-market rates, and controlling employee spend—all within a single, elegant interface. The target audience is scaling SMEs that have outgrown simple banking but aren't ready for complex ERPs.
Target User Journey (Finance Manager)
Open local GBP and EUR account details instantly to accept customer payments like a local business.
Set rules to auto-convert incoming EUR to USD at mid-market rates to maintain base liquidity.
Issue a virtual card to the Marketing Lead with a strict $5k/mo budget tied to the USD balance.
Pay a Polish contractor in PLN directly from the USD balance without correspondent bank fees.
All transactions and matched receipts sync automatically to Xero/Quickbooks.
Action: Designing the Hub
Research, Information Architecture & Core Flows
CFO User Interviews
To move beyond assumptions, I conducted 12 remote interviews with startup CFOs and Head of Finance roles. A recurring pattern emerged: the "month-end close" was a source of massive anxiety. They were manually downloading CSVs from their US bank, a separate European bank, and three different corporate card platforms, then using VLOOKUPs in Excel to map expenses. I documented this fragmentation via a detailed Journey Map, highlighting that the core UX problem wasn't moving money—it was tracking it centrally.
Information Architecture & The "Treasury" Dashboard
The biggest challenge in multi-currency design is "Base Currency Anchoring." A CFO needs to know their total liquidity in their home currency (USD), while simultaneously seeing their active balances in EUR, GBP, and SGD. I designed the dashboard to elevate the aggregated USD value while keeping individual ledgers one click away.
Placeholder: Unified Treasury Dashboard UI
USD
EUR
GBPDeep Dive: Virtual Cards & Spend Controls
Trust, but verify programmatically.
Decentralizing Corporate Spend
Corporate cards traditionally carry high risk, leading CFOs to hoard them. This bottleneck means marketing can't buy ads without asking the CFO for the plastic card.
I designed a Self-Serve Spend Flow. Employees can request a virtual card for a specific purpose (e.g., "Google Ads"). They select the budget, frequency, and currency. The request routes to their manager via Slack. Once approved, the virtual card is instantly generated and tied directly to the main ledger. If the employee leaves, the card is paused instantly.
- Merchant-locked cards (only works at Google)
- Auto-expiring cards for one-off SaaS subscriptions
- SMS/Push notifications nagging for receipt capture
Request New Card
Placeholder: Virtual Card Management UI
Projected Outcomes
How this impacts the bottom line for SMEs.