Galileo’s Console is the control layer for some of the biggest names in fintech — SoFi, Chime, Robinhood, Monzo, Dave. When I arrived, the operators configuring card programs and running settlement were drowning in a legacy interface that demanded constant manual intervention. I treated the redesign as an experiment in a question I’d been circling for years: can certainty in a complex system be designed deliberately, rather than accumulated by accident? The evidence came back rather clearly.
Can operator certainty in a system moving $26B a year be designed deliberately — or is it only ever earned slowly, by accident?
Principal designer. End-to-end Console redesign, information architecture to pixel — plus the design system and handoff practice to sustain it. Led two contractors and an agency.
90% less manual intervention, 65% fewer implementation bugs, onboarding time halved, NPS +2 — across clients at SoFi, Chime, and Robinhood scale.
Galileo processes over $26B in annual transactions for fintechs building on its infrastructure. But the operator-facing Console — where clients configure card programs, set authorization limits, manage payouts, and monitor settlement — was built for functionality, not usability.
The result: operations teams couldn't configure programs without calling support. Manual intervention was required for workflows that should have been self-service. The interface patterns were inconsistent across financial domains, and years of rapid growth had created deep technical debt in the UX layer.
Meanwhile, Galileo's clients — SoFi, Chime, Robinhood — were growing fast and demanding a platform experience that matched the quality of the APIs they'd built on.
"The operators I shadowed weren't confused by the financial concepts. They were confused by the interface. They knew exactly what they needed to configure — they just couldn't find it, couldn't trust what they were seeing, and couldn't tell if their changes had taken effect."
Three working hypotheses: that the Console could become genuinely self-service (what we called “DIYability”); that a design system could scale across financial domains; and that structured handoff with engineering would end the pattern of shipped-but-broken features. All three held.
Redesigned how operators manage card authorization limits, fees, transaction rules, and product settings. Introduced intuitive controls for complex financial parameters, a compare feature for configuration versions, and clear confirmation states so operators always knew what changed.
Designed a comprehensive permissions system with separation of duties — letting administrators assign granular access by workspace and role. Critical for compliance in a platform where a misconfiguration can affect millions of dollars in transactions.
Built multi-stage approval workflows for configuration changes, with full audit trails. Operators could now trace who changed what, when, and why — turning a compliance liability into a confidence signal.
Spearheaded development of a comprehensive design system — grid systems, color palette, typography, and a component library with specialized financial interface patterns. Created governance and documentation that let the system scale across teams.
Engineering could not guarantee sub-minute freshness on settlement data. Rather than imply live figures, every number carries an explicit “as of” timestamp. It looks slower. It is more trustworthy — and operators told us so.
Product pushed for one-click configuration changes. We kept multi-stage confirmation for anything touching money movement: an operator moving millions should never wonder whether a click “took.” Speed lost the argument to certainty.
A customizable home screen was scoped for v1. We cut it to fund approval flows and audit history instead. Configurable widgets delight demos; audit trails retain clients.
90% reduction in manual intervention in payment configuration and settlement workflows. Transaction throughput capacity improved 40%. Operators could self-serve configurations that previously required a support call.
65% fewer implementation bugs through structured design-to-development workflows. Design-to-dev handoff issues dropped 50%. New feature delivery accelerated 35%.
NPS increased by 2 full points. New platform onboarding time cut in half. Support tickets for interface issues dropped 70%.
Supported scaling to $26B+ in annual transaction volume. Enabled expansion into new financial product categories. Strengthened Galileo's competitive position as the BaaS infrastructure standard.
"Operators in financial infrastructure don't want delight; they want certainty. Every decision came back to one question — does the operator know exactly what just happened? I have since found the same question sitting at the center of AI interfaces. That transfer is the most useful thing Galileo taught me."
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