Getting a regulated onboarding product built across four vendors and a compliance team

BAKAI needed to onboard corporate clients through a chain of systems that had never been asked to work together: a client-facing workspace, a KYC and AML provider, an e-signature tool, and a core banking platform, built by an offshore development team.

No single party owned the flow end to end. I translated what compliance needed into requirements four vendors could build against, and keeping the dependencies between them from collapsing the timeline.

Client / Project

BAKAI / Corporate onbaording

Client / Project

BAKAI / Corporate onbaording

Platform

Responsive web

Platform

Responsive web

Role

UX, UI, Project management

Role

UX, UI, Project management

Year / Duration

2026 / Ongoing

Year / Duration

2026 / Ongoing

Context

Corporate onboarding is a legal question wearing a form

Each vendor understood their own piece. Compliance understood the regulation. The relationship managers understood the client. What didn't exist was a single account of how a corporate application actually travels from first contact to an open account — and every gap in that account was a gap someone would work around manually after launch.

The role was to hold that whole picture: define what gets built, decide what gets deferred, sequence the work so no vendor is waiting on a decision nobody has made, and make sure the version that ships is one the people using it can actually complete.

Four vendors, one critical path, no shared backlog

Compliance rules written for auditors, not for builders

Problem statment

Regulated onboarding fails in the space between teams, where compliance intent has been agreed but never written as a requirement, where two vendors each assume the other is handling the handoff, and where the edge cases nobody scoped become the operations team's problem on day one.

Regulated onboarding fails in the space between teams, where compliance intent has been agreed but never written as a requirement, where two vendors each assume the other is handling the handoff, and where the edge cases nobody scoped become the operations team's problem on day one.

The work

Made compliance intent buildable

Turned positions held across compliance and the business into a decision matrix with named approvers and acceptance criteria. Writing it down exposed the gaps.

Made compliance intent buildable

Turned positions held across compliance and the business into a decision matrix with named approvers and acceptance criteria. Writing it down exposed the gaps.

Made compliance intent buildable

Turned positions held across compliance and the business into a decision matrix with named approvers and acceptance criteria. Writing it down exposed the gaps.

Built one specification across two flows

Reconciled the RM-led and self-serve journeys into a single field-level spec. The comparison caught mismatches that were cheap to fix on paper and expensive in production.

Built one specification across two flows

Reconciled the RM-led and self-serve journeys into a single field-level spec. The comparison caught mismatches that were cheap to fix on paper and expensive in production.

Built one specification across two flows

Reconciled the RM-led and self-serve journeys into a single field-level spec. The comparison caught mismatches that were cheap to fix on paper and expensive in production.

Sequenced four vendors on one critical path

Gated each build on the decision it depended on, put dates on those decisions, and surfaced the dependency that quietly determined whether the launch date held.

Sequenced four vendors on one critical path

Gated each build on the decision it depended on, put dates on those decisions, and surfaced the dependency that quietly determined whether the launch date held.

Sequenced four vendors on one critical path

Gated each build on the decision it depended on, put dates on those decisions, and surfaced the dependency that quietly determined whether the launch date held.

Questioned a vendor agreement before signing it

Read the configuration rather than the contract, established the obligation didn't apply to our flow, and took it back as a question. It wasn't signed.

Questioned a vendor agreement before signing it

Read the configuration rather than the contract, established the obligation didn't apply to our flow, and took it back as a question. It wasn't signed.

Questioned a vendor agreement before signing it

Read the configuration rather than the contract, established the obligation didn't apply to our flow, and took it back as a question. It wasn't signed.

Note

This is an ongoing project

© 2026