Sasha
Fedorov
Contact
A unified customer journey: from onboarding to the first trade
Product
FinchTrade
B2B liquidity provider for crypto and fiat
Role
Lead product designer.
Client app, ops admin and design system.
Team
Product owner, 2 frontend and 2 backend engineers, 2 QA engineers, back-office and trading teams,
3-person operations (ops) team
Problem
The client’s path to the first trade was broken on three levels
Journey. Onboarding ran in a third-party iframe, failing to provide a seamless experience, and ops had to move client data by hand. The deposit flow was unclear. To trade, the client used a rented third-party venue and went through a second onboarding there.
UX. Navigation was not obvious, and similar screens used different patterns. The product did not add up to one path.
Design foundation. Six different tables, unpredictable control sizes, extra decoration. The working Figma file was detached from the library and missed half of the production flows, so every new feature started with rebuilding screens from production.
Solution
We planned and shipped four releases: our own onboarding, address management, deposits and withdrawals, and in-house trading.
I led the design of the client app and the ops admin, and moved the product to one system of components, styles and behavior patterns.
Results
A new client goes from sign-up to the first trade in one product
In-house trading grew from 1% of the company’s monthly trading volume at launch to 26.5% by August 2026. In August, 48% of active clients traded in-house.
Ops onboard clients in our own admin, ask clients for missing data less often and no longer create deposit addresses by hand.
About 93% of flows now use one design system — consistent enough for the frontend team to update the admin without design.
The client and ops flow I built for the team
My role
I owned what clients and ops see, end to end: from problem framing and research to the design review of the finished feature. Along the way, I adapted solutions to engineering limits and AML requirements.
I started with the problem, not the request: I checked if it was the right one, looked for a simpler solution that the market already knows and checked it with engineers — what we can build and at what cost.
Introduced modern UX patterns, one set of rules for all screens and a scalable design system.
New features are built from shared components and styles, not from old production screens. This keeps legacy low and speeds up both design and frontend.
What I discovered
Ops team. The same two problems kept coming up: chasing clients for key stakeholder data, and creating a deposit address at the custodian by hand for every new client address. These releases removed both.
Competitors. I checked our section structure and data model against Kraken: our clients know exchanges, so the product should feel familiar. The visible Deposit and Withdraw buttons also come from retail exchanges.
Solution details
1. A long AML questionnaire in five clear steps
Onboarding now has three steps with progress: questionnaire, verification and signing the T&C.
AML requirements set what the questionnaire asks. I made it easier to finish: I split it into five parts, grouped by topic and data type.
Corporate data;
Documents;
Business overview;
Authorised person. A separate step shows clearly who fills in the data and who signs the T&C at the end. This removed many edge cases, for example a manager without signing rights signing the T&C.
Key stakeholders. By AML rules, FinchTrade must know the full ownership structure of every client company.
If a stakeholder is a company, the client adds its directors and, for each one, names the company they control — until all stakeholders are individuals.
We could build full ownership logic, but the release had to be fast, so one field, “Controlling company name”, solved it.
Sasha Fedorov,
Lead product designer.
Happy to chat about your product. Let’s meet.
© 2026