Ed Chen
Senior Product Designer
Institutional Finance · Compliance UX · Design Systems · AI-Assisted Workflows
I design products where imprecision is unacceptable.
Institutional trading terminals. Compliance onboarding for UHNW clients. Risk dashboards that fund managers depend on at 2am during a Tokyo session. These are the products I build — and they have no tolerance for ambiguity, half-finished thinking, or design decisions that can't be defended.
At ACY Securities I lead design across five product lines — 100K+ active traders, 40+ regulated jurisdictions, $2B+ in daily trading volume. The 150+ component system I built is ASIC/FCA/MiFID II compliant by default: when regulations change, updates ship in 3–5 days rather than the 3–4 week rebuilds that came before it. Eight regulatory changes absorbed. Zero structural reworks. Before ACY, I was sole designer and product owner for Christie's International Real Estate — nine months, five global offices, $5M–$80M UHNW property buyers.
Every decision I make gets documented — the rationale, the trade-offs, the alternative I chose not to take. Not for process theatre, but because six months later when Legal asks why a disclosure was positioned that way, the answer needs to exist. That discipline is how I've maintained design governance across five product lines without a dedicated review committee.
My MFA was in digital design. My instinct was toward editorial craft — beautiful layouts, typographic restraint, things you could point to and say "that's the work." Christie's gave me that. Nine months designing for $80M property clients taught me something unexpected: the most important design decisions weren't visual. They were about trust. Which information went first. What the client saw when uncertainty was high.
When ACY Securities asked me to redesign a trading platform audited by regulators, the same instinct applied — just with higher stakes. A misplaced risk warning isn't a design flaw. It's a compliance violation. That clarity — that every decision has a real consequence — is what kept me in this domain. I've never wanted to go back to designing things where it didn't matter.
Three Disciplines. One Standard.
Compliance Infrastructure
Design systems where regulatory requirements are component properties, not afterthoughts. ASIC disclosures, FCA risk warnings, MiFID II best execution reporting — baked in at the token level, enforced at the component level, invisible to the user.
Execution Surfaces
High-frequency interfaces where milliseconds matter and errors cost real money. Trading terminals, order management systems, algo execution monitors, FIX protocol portals. Keyboard-first, density-optimised, zero cognitive overhead under pressure.
Trust Interfaces
UHNW client portals, private banking dashboards, KYC onboarding flows. Interfaces where the design itself communicates institutional credibility — where restraint is the signal, and every interaction reinforces the relationship between client and institution.
I built a working institutional trading terminal — in this portfolio.
Not a prototype. Not a Figma mockup. A fully functional Bloomberg-class terminal with live price simulation, a real FIX 4.4 order lifecycle, TWAP/VWAP algo execution, options chain with Greeks, a Kronos AI signal engine, and an account ledger that deducts cash on every fill.
- Real-time GARCH vol engine across 18 correlated instruments
- FIX 4.4 session state — HeartBtInt, ExecutionReports, Order lifecycle
- TWAP / VWAP algo execution with live slice monitoring
- Options chain with Black-Scholes Greeks (Δ, Γ, Θ, Vega)
- P&L factor attribution — market β, tech, bond, idiosyncratic
- Kronos AI signal engine with regime-aware confidence scoring
How I Work — Non-Negotiables
Zero-Tolerance for Ambiguity
In institutional finance, a confusing risk disclosure isn't a "UX issue" — it's a compliance violation. A misaligned margin call interface isn't "tech debt" — it's a client losing money they shouldn't have. I design as if every screen will be reviewed by a regulator, because in my experience, they eventually are.
Every Decision Documented
I don't make design choices I can't defend. Every component in my systems has a rationale — why this density, why this hierarchy, why this disclosure placement. When a PM, a lawyer, or a regulator asks "why," I have the answer ready. This isn't process overhead — in regulated finance, it's the baseline.
Systems Over Heroics
I build design systems that let three engineering teams ship without waiting on me — not because I'm hands-off, but because a well-governed system is more reliable than any individual. When I leave a project, the system keeps working. That's how I measure whether it actually worked.
Production Is the Standard
A Figma file is not a shipped product. In regulated finance, the gap between design intent and engineering implementation is where compliance breaks down — a disclosure in the wrong position, an error state that never got designed. I stay through QA, through regulatory review, through the first live deployment. The work is done when it's right in production. Not before.
Financial interfaces carry weight that consumer products don't. A mislabeled order, an ambiguous disclosure, a slow-loading position tile during volatility — each one has a downstream cost. That constraint is what I've spent five years designing inside, and it's the reason I'm moving toward institutional work rather than away from it.
Experience
Design lead at a 150-person ASIC-regulated broker — 100K+ active traders, 40+ jurisdictions, five product lines. I built the governance infrastructure (design system, component audit trails, compliance review workflows) that lets engineering teams ship autonomously while maintaining regulatory accuracy across every market we operate in.
- Built a 150+ component design system across web, iOS, Android, and institutional products — engineering implementation time dropped ~33%; component misuse dropped from ~30% to under 8% (based on quarterly code review audits of component usage across 3 engineering teams)
- Redesigned the 47-field KYC/AML onboarding; new-user sign-up drop-off improved from 73% to 45% (GA4 funnel, Q2→Q3 2022) after a three-week negotiation with Legal and leadership — all ASIC requirements kept, audit trail added
- Encoded ASIC disclosure rules, FCA risk warning standards, MiFID II best-execution reporting, and Dodd-Frank OTC transparency requirements into component properties. Eight regulatory revisions absorbed at the token layer between 2022–2025 (including ASIC RG 268 rev. 2023 and MiFID II Art. 27 amendments) with no component-level rework and zero QA regression
- Designed LogixTrader: a keyboard-first web trading terminal used by 20K+ traders. Applied research findings from a paired usability study (n=15 traders) that informed the order entry redesign — consolidated a 6-step flow to 2 steps, reducing placement time from 8.2s to 2.9s. Same research framework applied independently across the Finlogix platform.
- Designed ACY Connect: institutional FIX 4.4 API portal for 12+ hedge fund clients — support tickets dropped 67%, integration time went from 3 weeks to 1 week
- Designed the corporate identity for the ACYLogix Group — logos for ACY Group, ACY Securities, ACY Capital, ACY Wealth, ACY Advisory, ACY Connect, Zerologix, Zerologix Taiwan, Logixel, and ACYLogix itself (roughly 90% of the marks on the group org chart). What started as a product-design role quietly expanded into owning the visual identity of an eight-entity financial services group.
- Led consumer mobile app design (iOS + Android) for 100K+ users across 12 countries — multilingual UX (AR/EN/VN/TH with full RTL support), consumer onboarding that cut KYC drop-off, and progressive disclosure for first-time traders. Post-2024 restructure, design lead across all five product lines (web, iOS, Android, institutional APIs, compliance tooling) — scaled output with AI-assisted workflows on low-risk work (copy, asset resizing, scaffolding), with manual QA on every compliance surface.
Want the four-year narrative — chapters, mistakes, lessons learned? Read the full Career Journey →
0-to-1 B2B2C pet services marketplace connecting grooming, boarding, and veterinary providers to urban pet owners across Japan. Seven months of Tokyo field research before first line of code.
- Lead designer and developer: product architecture, iOS & Android app, and React Native frontend
- Map-centric discovery interface with venue-level filtering and venue recommendations based on proximity and pet profile
- PawsSafe Network: 24/7 connection between pet owners and certified emergency care providers
- Stack: React Native · Firebase · Google Maps API
Hired as a web engineer for Christie's International Real Estate editorial platform — serving UHNW clients ($5M–$80M property buyers) across NYC, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Taipei. With no dedicated designer or product manager, the role expanded to cover design direction, UX decisions, and full-stack implementation across five global offices. The audience expects institutional-grade polish; the brand demands 250 years of earned restraint.
- Redesigned the CIRE blog from scratch; +20% page views (GA, post-launch comparison Q4 2021 → Q1 2022, same content volume), 60% fewer database queries (47→18 per page) — performance matters when your audience judges credibility by load time
- Built the company's first Figma-to-production workflow; design-to-deploy dropped from 2 weeks to 3 days across five international offices
- Integrated Salesforce CRM workflows and standardised content operations — ensuring consistent brand voice across all markets
- The core lesson from Christie's: restraint is the luxury. Every design decision was measured against whether it preserved or diluted two centuries of institutional trust
Graduate study in digital design — editorial craft, typographic systems, interaction design. The editorial sensibility from this program is what Christie's originally hired for, and what underpins the visual restraint in every financial interface I've built since.
Skills & Capabilities
Target Roles
Senior IC and design lead roles in quant trading, market infrastructure, or institutional finance — where design decisions carry regulatory, financial, or reputational consequence. The fit I'm looking for: small teams, high stakes, product work that lives or dies on detail.
Open to senior IC and design lead roles. Willing to relocate to NY, London, Sydney, Zürich, Genève, Tokyo. APAC remote considered for the right product.
Education
Recognition
Let's Talk
Looking for Senior Product Design roles at institutions where design quality directly affects client trust, regulatory standing, and business outcomes. If your team needs someone who treats every detail like it matters — because in finance, it does — I'd welcome the conversation.