Fintech

Xen Capital

A recap at my time with Xen Capital

Xen Capital

quick overview

During my time at Xen Technologies as the Senior UX Designer, I had the opportunity to lead the user experience efforts across multiple projects. I worked closely with the CEO and CTO, managing everything related to UX—from establishing design pipelines to collaborating on design assets, promo videos, and both website and app designs. It was a dynamic role that required close collaboration with developers and managing a small team of junior designers and interns.

Key Projects

Xen App: Spearheaded the UX design for the core Xen mobile app, focusing on usability and delivering a seamless trading experience.
Xen Website & Trading Platform: Led the UX revamp of the Xen website and integrated trading platform to improve user engagement and streamline financial services.
Xen Socials & Marketing Collaterals: Contributed to the design of social media visuals and marketing assets, ensuring a cohesive brand experience across all digital touchpoints.

Unique Challenges

Setting Foundations: One of the key challenges was laying the groundwork for a structured design process. I worked on establishing the right tools and methodologies to ensure effective UX practices.
Translating Vision: Another challenge was interpreting and translating the CEO’s vision into something tangible that both the design and development teams could align with. This required bridging the gap between creative aspirations and technical feasibility.
Balancing Feedback: Managing expectations from both the CEO and CTO was a constant balancing act. It was about finding compromises to meet business goals while adhering to UX best practices.

About the client

Xen is the first platform of its kind that eliminates upfront fees, offering wealth advisors and asset managers a transparent marketplace for alternative investments. It’s designed to help you close deals more efficiently, anytime and anywhere. The platform enables alternative investment managers to reach a broader network of investors while giving wealth advisors access to a wider range of products. We provide a fully branded investment portal that delivers a seamless experience for your clients, making it easier to operate by digitizing and centralizing workflows—from marketing and onboarding to reporting—simplifying every step of the administrative process. At its core, Xen connects product providers and wealth advisors, helping everyone grow together. We’ve made alternative investments simpler and more accessible than ever before.

Visual Language

For Xen, I crafted a cohesive visual language that balanced professionalism with modern fintech aesthetics. The branding aimed to communicate transparency and trust while ensuring a seamless experience across all platforms, from the investment portal to social media.

Brand Guidelines

For Xen’s visual branding, we chose a color palette that balances professionalism with modernity. The deep teal tones (Pantone 309 C and Pantone 320 C) convey trust, reliability, and depth, qualities essential to a fintech platform. The lighter teal and orange accents (Pantone 324 C and Pantone 164 C) provide a fresh, vibrant contrast, representing innovation and approachability.

The Radikal typeface was selected for its clean, geometric structure, embodying clarity and modernity. The Radikal Regular font was used for its strong legibility and professional feel, while Radikal Light added a softer, more approachable tone, ensuring a balance between authority and user-friendliness across the platform.

Establishing the Xen Tooling Pipeline

Creating a streamlined process to bring ideas from concept to development was crucial to Xen’s success. The right tools made all the difference.

The pipeline

As Senior UX Designer, I had the opportunity to map out and establish a robust tooling process at Xen. By leveraging tools like Mural, Overflow, Sketch, Flinto, ProtoPie, Useberry, and Zeplin, we created an efficient pipeline that facilitated everything from early ideation to final developer handoff. This process allowed for faster iterations, thorough user testing, and seamless collaboration across teams, ensuring that every stage of the design journey was optimized for both speed and quality.

Xen app : Breaking Barriers in Investment for Millennials

Xen's early vision was to leverage the power of blockchain to create a stablecoin and offer fractionalized access to private equity funds, democratizing high-value investments for a younger generation.

Initial sketches on flows

In the early stages of Xen, the goal was to dive into the crypto space with a focus on creating a stablecoin and offering fractionalized access to private equity funds for millennials. The idea was to make high-value, traditionally exclusive investment opportunities more accessible to a younger audience, using blockchain technology to lower the barrier of entry. By allowing fractional ownership, Xen aimed to democratize private equity, enabling millennials to invest in PE funds with smaller amounts, while the stablecoin would provide security and stability in the volatile crypto market. This was the foundation for the Xen app’s innovative approach to fintech and wealth management, targeting a demographic often overlooked in traditional investment spaces.

Final Design

Expanding Liquidity in Private Equity

Xen’s transition to a traditional private equity platform introduced a secondary trade market, enabling investors to trade shares in private equity funds, offering much-needed liquidity in the space.

Transitioning to a Traditional PE Platform

As Xen evolved, the focus shifted from the crypto space to a more traditional private equity model. The new direction centered on building a secondary trade platform that allowed investors to buy and sell shares in private equity funds, providing greater liquidity in an otherwise illiquid market. This pivot aimed to meet the needs of a wider range of investors, while still maintaining the core vision of increasing accessibility to alternative investments.

Planning

Working closely with the Project Manager and CEO, we collaborated to map out the task flows and functionality needed for the platform. By creating a visual sitemap, we were able to outline the user journey, pinpoint key touchpoints, and ensure that all necessary features were logically connected. This visual representation allowed us to break down complex processes, identify any gaps or bottlenecks, and streamline the overall user experience. The sitemap became a crucial tool for aligning the team’s vision and ensuring that both the business goals and user needs were integrated into the platform's design and functionality.

Corporate Website Rebranding and Xen Portal Development :

We transformed Xen’s corporate website into a dynamic platform that catered to both casual users and serious investors, providing a tailored experience for each segment.

Planning and final designs

As part of Xen’s evolution, I led the rebranding of the corporate website, turning it into a more user-friendly and visually compelling landing page. The goal was to create a seamless browsing experience for average users while also segmenting investors who required access to more specialized content. This redesign included the development of a Xen portal that offered tailored experiences based on user type, ensuring the platform met the specific needs of each group. The new website not only served as a fresh, modern face for Xen but also became a hub for alternative investment education and resources, driving engagement and showcasing the brand’s forward-thinking vision.

Xen Socials – Building a Community for Young Investors

Xen sought to grow a community of young, like-minded investors by creating a social platform where alternative investments could spark conversation and engagement.

As part of Xen’s broader vision, the company wanted to create a social platform that would bring together millennial investors interested in private equity (PE) funds. The aim was to build a thriving community where users could share insights, discuss investment opportunities, and foster a sense of collaboration around alternative investments. I worked on designing a seamless social experience, incorporating features like personalized feeds, discussion boards, and opportunities to engage with investment content. This helped position Xen not just as a financial platform but as a space where young investors could connect and grow their knowledge.

Final Thoughts – My Journey at Xen

Xen played a pivotal role in my growth as a Senior UX Designer and was instrumental in my transition to becoming a UX Lead. The experience shaped me professionally and personally, laying the foundation for my leadership journey.

Working at Xen was a defining moment in my career, especially when it came to management and leadership. As a Senior UX Designer, I had the unique opportunity to not only focus on design but to wear multiple hats in a fast-paced fintech startup. I was responsible for leading a small team, collaborating with developers, and aligning design decisions with broader business goals.

The complexities of working in fintech meant that design was not solely about aesthetics—it was governed by business decisions, compliance regulations, available resources, budget constraints, and tight timelines. This was something I didn’t fully grasp at first, but my time at Xen taught me to balance user experience with these realities. Every decision had to be carefully weighed, ensuring that it met both the user’s needs and the company’s objectives.

I attribute a lot of my professional growth to Xen, where I learned the importance of strategic thinking, management, and collaborative culture. It was the place where I grew from a senior designer into a UX Lead, gaining confidence and developing the skills to take ownership of complex projects. Looking back, Xen was a significant chapter in my journey, shaping the leader I am today.