Replatforming credit risk.
Rethinking how we design.
Modernising a 25-year-old platform by bringing fragmented analyst workflows, legacy tools and disconnected data into one connected experience.
Role: Lead product designer
Scope: Credit reviews, information architecture, UI and shared design foundations
Team: Product, Design, Engineering and Data
Timeframe: 2024–present · Multi-year transformation
01 — The Product
Rethinking 25 years of legacy workflows
Modernise 25 years of legacy workflows without disrupting the people who rely on them.
The design challenge
More than a new interface
I joined Macquarie to lead product design for Coral, the programme replacing Credit Workstation, a platform that had supported the bank’s credit-risk operations for 25 years.
We needed to understand how analysts and approvers worked, untangle legacy processes and design a better experience without disrupting the business.
Counterparties
The businesses Macquarie works with and their connections to other businesses.
Limits & exposures
The lending limits and financial risk associated with those businesses.
Credit reviews
How analysts assess businesses and their lending risk.
Scorecards
How analysts assess and quantify a business’s risk of default.
Two connected challenges
Make the data accessible
Migrate data from the legacy platform cleanly, while supporting a shift from consuming information to producing structured data that can be shared across Macquarie Group.
Bring credit analysis into Coral
Move work from PowerPoint and Excel into the platform, giving analysts enough flexibility to do their jobs without recreating the Microsoft suite.
“To design a better product, we also had to improve the way we designed it.”
02 — The Design Practice
Improving how we design and deliver
Better foundations for a connected product
Multiple designers were working across interconnected areas of Coral. We needed shared patterns, clearer decisions and stronger collaboration to keep the experience consistent and avoid solving the same problems repeatedly.
Design system & consistency
Improve shared components, interaction patterns and design standards across the platform.
Processes & collaboration
Strengthen critiques, decision documentation and collaboration across Design, Product and Technology.
AI in design delivery
Use AI to support research, exploration, documentation and prototyping, and reduce repetitive work.
Making the practice part of delivery
Weekly design critiques
Challenge interaction choices and improve consistency across workstreams.
Fortnightly stakeholder sessions
Bring Risk, Product and Engineering into decisions before delivery.
Weekly planning
Make priorities, dependencies and ownership visible across workstreams.
Fortnightly retrospectives
Surface friction and improve how the team works together.
Delivery checkpoints
Review at key milestones to identify risks early and keep delivery aligned.
Design governance
Establish shared patterns and review points to protect coherence as Coral evolves.
Understanding our users
A shared understanding of who uses Coral
We brought Product, Business and Technology together to define the people using Coral, their goals and their responsibilities.
01 / ANALYSIS
Business analysts
Analyse counterparties, prepare reviews and manage risk assessments across a portfolio.
02 / DECISIONS
Business approver
Review recommendations, challenge assumptions and approve key credit decisions.
03 / OPERATIONS
Credit Ops
Maintain data quality, manage operational processes and ensure compliance requirements are met.
04 / SPECIALIST RISK
Troubled Assets
Manage high-risk counterparties, restructure exposures and monitor distressed portfolios.
A foundation for user access management
Clear user definitions established the foundation for future role-based permissions, governance controls and scalable access models.
Rethinking information architecture
Question the structure, not just the labels
Over 25 years, Credit Workstation had accumulated features, workflows and navigation patterns. Migration was an opportunity to rethink what belonged together, simplify the experience and establish a structure that could grow with the business.
Legacy complexity
Incremental change had left workflows fragmented and information difficult to find.
Migration constraints
Phased delivery needed to preserve essential workflows.
Present and future needs
Solve today’s problems while leaving room for the platform to grow.
Consistency at scale
Parallel workstreams needed shared navigation patterns to feel like one platform.
From legacy structure to a shared framework
We combined business and technical knowledge with qualitative and quantitative research, accounting for the realities of migration.
Discovery & audit
Audit the existing platform, workflows and navigation to understand migration impacts and identify opportunities to simplify.
Architecture workshops
Align Product, Business and Technology on navigation principles, platform structure and the future state.
Card sorting
Work directly with users to understand how they group information, tasks and business concepts.
Tree testing
Validate the proposed structure through findability and task-success testing.
Navigation framework
Translate workshop outcomes and research into a visual framework that teams can review, refine and adopt.
What this work produced
A shared information architecture framework, informed by research, tested against real tasks and designed to support a consistent experience as Coral evolves.
A shared future-state vision
One direction across many workstreams
Teams were redesigning different parts of Coral at the same time. Without a shared direction, we risked recreating the fragmentation of the legacy platform.
The future-state blueprint became a decision-making reference: a way to connect feature choices to the whole experience while delivery continued in phases.
Alignment
Make the intended end-to-end journey visible to Business, Product and Technology.
A decision guide
Compare individual choices against the broader experience.
Delivery confidence
Give workstreams a common destination while allowing phased delivery.
From requirements to delivery
Start with requirements
Identify the business requirements and outcomes the platform needs to support.
Shape the plan
Map a high-level journey around the major pain points.
Prototype with AI
Build a representative journey that touches those pain points.
Review with the team
Challenge assumptions and surface gaps together.
Refine requirements
Turn feedback into clearer, more detailed business requirements.
Design for delivery
Polish the designs and shape a practical path to implementation.
Delivering through vertical slices
Prove the journey
Start with one complete credit review
We tested a simple credit review from trigger to final approval, touching every key step. This helped us see how the platform worked as a connected experience while allowing teams to deliver incrementally.
- Trigger
- Single counterparty analyst input
- Add limits
- Complete a scorecard
- Reviewer input
- Approver input
- Queries & comments
- Set conditions
- Approve & finalise
A proven foundation for delivery
The vertical slice produced a validated end-to-end experience, reusable design patterns and a shared blueprint. It helped teams identify gaps early and reduce uncertainty.
Then scale the same journey
We expanded the journey to handle more complex scenarios: 30+ counterparty analysts, multiple limits and limit types, multiple scorecards, reviewers, approvers and conditions.
One connected experience
Test the transitions between capabilities, not only the individual screens.
Reusable patterns
Build complex scenarios on the interactions established in the simple slice.
Incremental delivery
Give teams a shared blueprint while capabilities evolve in phases.
A clearer search experience
Find counterparties without knowing the exact name
The legacy search allowed one field at a time: short name or legal name. Users had to choose exact-match or contains, then enter a matching keyword or letter sequence.
We redesigned search around flexible queries, visible filters and useful context in the results.
SEARCH / BEFORE
A restrictive starting point
The legacy interface required users to understand the search rules before they could find a counterparty.
SEARCH / PROPOSED EXPERIENCE
Search broadly. Refine with context.
Analysts can start with a keyword, narrow results with optional filters and review relevant details directly in the results table.
The decisions behind search
Search broadly
Allow a flexible term before users know a legal or short name.
Keep filters visible
Show applied criteria so users can refine a query without losing context.
Support quick scanning
Surface relevant risk attributes directly in the results table.
The trade-off
Keep common searches simple, and reveal advanced filters when they are needed.
Bringing reviews into Coral
From separate documents to structured information
Credit reviews combined detailed analysis with supporting paperwork, often held outside Coral in PowerPoint and Excel.
Bringing analysis into Coral allowed each review to create structured information that teams across Macquarie Group could access, share and use.
REVIEWS / BEFORE
Analysis lived outside the platform
The existing review record did not bring all the analysis and supporting work into one connected workspace.
REVIEWS / WORKSPACE
Keep the review and its context together
The proposed workspace brings analyst input, linked risk data and conversations alongside the primary task.
The interaction model behind a review
Keep context
Keep the review summary, analyst input and linked risk data together.
Query in place
Make questions and responses available alongside the evidence.
Separate approval
Distinguish comments, queries, conditions and final decisions.
Support parallel work
Analysts, reviewers and approvers need to collaborate without disrupting the primary analysis flow. The same structure must support multiple contributors and conditions.
REVIEWS / INTERACTIONS
Collaboration alongside the evidence
A side panel supports conversations and responses while keeping the review in view. This block is ready for the final interaction visual.
Review interaction detail
Final visual to be added
REVIEWS / CONNECTED WORKFLOWS
Bring scorecards and complex reviews into the journey
The wider experience connects scorecards, multiple contributors, limits and conditions within the review workflow. This block is reserved for the final supporting visual.
Connected review journey
Final visual to be added
Foundations for what comes next
A platform foundation and a stronger design practice
Coral brings product redesign and design leadership together. The work establishes shared structures for navigation, review workflows and collaboration, alongside a more consistent way for teams to design and deliver.
Shared understanding
Defined user roles and responsibilities provide a foundation for access management and governance.
Connected workflows
Vertical slices connect capabilities into an end-to-end credit-review journey.
Consistent delivery
Shared patterns, critique and decision-making practices help workstreams move toward the same vision.
The work continues
This is a multi-year transformation with phased delivery. The designs show the intended experience; individual capabilities are at different stages of delivery.