Brokerage & Custody Experience

Singapore Client Portal

COMPANY

Sygnum

ROLE

User Research, UX Design, Design System

Industry

Fintech

YEAR

2022

Context

Sygnum Singapore is a financial institution that offers regulated solutions for managing both digital and traditional assets. It aims to provide clients with a secure and intuitive platform aligned with local compliance standards.

The Sygnum Singapore client portal was developed to give clients direct control to trade, safeguard, and manage their crypto confidently and with ease.

Challenge

Clients onboarded to Sygnum Singapore had no dedicated platform to view their holdings or perform trades independently. All interactions were handled manually through relationship managers, resulting in limited visibility, and a fragmented client experience.

Outcome

While quantitative data is still being gathered, early feedback from internal stakeholders and relationship managers highlighted the platform’s clarity, task flow, and overall user confidence for both HNWI and institutional clients. Despite minor login friction due to security constraints, the project was launched smoothly within a tight timeline, establishing groundwork for future feature rollouts.

Timeframe

3 months

Role and Collaboration

As the sole designer, I partnered with relationship managers, compliance officers, traders, engineers, and product managers across Singapore and Switzerland to align the portal with user needs and regulatory requirements. I facilitated design reviews and refined solutions based on stakeholder feedback.

Process


Research and Planning

I began by exploring exchanges, experiencing user flows, and interacting with interfaces like wallet connections and transactions. Key patterns included prioritising user control, transparency, and seamless interaction.


User Interviews and Personas

After researching key crypto players, I interviewed target users to understand their experiences and asset management practices. Using these insights, I created personas to align the team with user behaviours and expectations. Insights from experienced colleagues further enriched my findings.


Insight

The biggest challenge in managing digital assets is the uncertainty users face after initiating a transaction. They primarily seek timely status updates and alerts to guide them through the process and inform them of the next steps.

​At the core, users want to feel secure and confident when handling their money.


Opportunity Framing

How might we enable accredited investors to track and transact digital assets with clarity, trust, and ease within a regulated environment?


Feature Ideas by Section

After talking to users, I mapped user feedback into feature categories across key sections: Dashboard, Trade, Custody, Transaction History, Notifications, and Support. Each sticky note reflects a user insight or request, helping to surface common needs such as faster trade execution, better transaction transparency, and easier access to support.



Feature Prioritisation

The following core features were prioritised into Must-have, Should-have, and Could-have categories, based on user insights, business goals, and implementation feasibility. This helped to align the MVP with user expectations and technical constraints, allow me to focus on delivering high-impact features first while planning for scalable enhancements in later phases.



Wireframing & User Flow

We conducted whiteboarding sessions to map out the structure, features, user flows, and edge cases for the Singapore client portal. I initially proposed a simplified “swap-style” interface for the trading terminal Market orders to prioritise ease of use and clarity.

However, after further discussions and platform alignment reviews, I had to pivot towards maintaining consistency with Sygnum Bank AG’s existing trading terminal design.

This shift required adapting to legacy design constraints while refining the experience for usability and clarity first. You can view the final trading terminal design in the Design Solution section below.



Design Solution

Design Principles

These three principles guided the UX decisions from how we displayed balances to how we structured confirmation screens. Here’s how they shaped the final product.


  1. Transparency

As a service that deals with money, it is crucial to clearly communicate transparency through the right content and design.​

  1. Guiding

Displaying visuals with key information at the right moment ensure users are guided through each step with clarity and confidence.

  1. Certainty in Actions

To ensure users feel confident in taking an action, the designs must clearly communicate to the users their expectations each time before they make a decision.


Design Solution

The final design streamlined key user flows across the portal. Entry points on the Home page highlight primary actions like trading and transfers, along with critical information clients want to see at a glance.


Home: Responsive assets overview dashboard to manage digital assets and cash holdings.


The trading terminal was designed to maintain visual and functional consistency with Sygnum Bank AG’s existing platform, while adapting it for the Singapore MVP rollout.

A key constraint was that only Market orders were supported at launch, Limit and TWAP orders had to be placed through the Brokerage Services hotline.

To address this, I optimised the interface for mobile responsiveness and ensured users could easily locate the brokerage support button to place other order types or access unlisted tokens.


Trade: Users are able to star their favourite trading pair from the watchlist.


The transaction history screen allows users to view their cash, digital asset, and trade order records. Users can export their full history and access detailed breakdowns, including order type, fees (with GST), and settlement status, supporting transparency and auditability for institutional clients.



Design System

UI components were created and contributed to the design library, with close collaboration with developers to ensure they are reusable and function consistently across the portal and other products.



User Testing and Feedback

Features tested:

  1. Trade execution (Market order only – MVP)

  2. Download statements

Objectives:

We wanted to evaluate whether users could:

  1. Locate where to execute key tasks (Trade / Download)

  2. Understand the information and next steps

  3. Navigate efficiently to find what they need

Engagement snapshot:

During initial launch, 41–52% of users (12–15 out of 29 clients) interacted with the new features within the first 2 weeks, a moderate adoption rate for a soft rollout.

Feedback highlights:

  1. Users described the interface as “clear” and “professional” during informal reviews with relationship managers.

  2. No support tickets were logged for statement downloads.

  3. Trading for market order is intuitive and straightforward.

  4. Some users expressed interest in having more token options, a product-level limitation at the time.

Additional trading screen insights:

  1. Some users felt that the balance display for trading wallets and cash accounts occupied more visual space than the core trading actions. This suggested a need to reconsider layout hierarchy and prioritise action-first interactions.


  2. Users also asked whether spread information could be displayed more clearly upfront especially those used to viewing bid/ask spreads on other trading platforms.

Learnings

The platform was designed to cater to a niche audience in the high-net-worth and institutional investor segment. However, user engagement was impacted by external business factors, such as licensing delays and the platform's early-stage audience size.

User engagement is a shared responsibility

The active user engagement rate reflects broader business challenges, such as licensing delays, rather than design flaws.

By working more closely across teams, we could have better anticipated challenges, set clearer expectations, and ensured the platform’s readiness to support user engagement from the start.

Design effort

Despite business challenges, the platform’s design was validated through user testing with positive feedback on ease of navigation for this MVP. There is definitely room for improvement for different product features down the road.

A balanced perspective

This experience reminded me that good design alone isn’t enough, it needs the right business strategy to thrive.