Build & Scale—The First in a Series of Product Ventures

Building scalable, tech-driven products that addressed ESG, REIT, and digital asset management demands.

Client: Synechron
Proposition: Business Accelerators
Industry: Fintech

Team & Timeframe:
Over a three-month period, I led the design efforts for the product workstream. My responsibilities encompassed conducting SME interviews, defining product strategies, managing a global design team, and fostering collaboration to align with the objectives of the Innovation Lab.

Key Activities:

Organized and facilitated design sprints.
Interviewed subject matter experts to inform decision-making.
Reframed key findings to guide product strategy development.
Managed a global design team to ensure cohesive execution.
Fostered collaboration and alignment with the Innovation Lab's goals.

RESULTS

30%

Reduction in clients' time-to-market through streamlined development processes using the accelerator suite of ventures.

$2M

Annual revenue, with strong growth indicators in subsequent quarters.

Launching Lean Accelerators

Implemented multiple pilot programs to test design in real market conditions

In 2021, the financial markets—both buy-side and sell-side—were navigating an increasingly intricate environment. A confluence of factors such as evolving regulatory demands, shifting investor priorities, and rapid advancements in digital technologies demanded strategic and timely responses from financial institutions. New forces like Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) compliance, the expansion of Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), and the proliferation of digital assets added layers of complexity to an already crowded landscape.

Problem Space—Synechron identified a market gap and sought to address an unmet need within their existing client base. In doing so, they aimed to expand their business reach across the vast B2B ecosystem, unlocking new opportunities in both buy-side and sell-side markets. The challenge was clear: institutions needed to not only adapt but also lead with innovation and foresight.

Figure 1:
The ESG Business Accelerator—ESG Booster

Analyze the holistic overview of an entire investment portfolio, including detailed insights into their ESG scores.
Evaluate a portfolio's overall trending ESG score and compare it to last year's performance.
Scrutinize the score benchmarked against various industrial averages, including the Dow Jones.
Explore the holistic overview of the entire investment portfolio, including detailed insights into their ESG scores.
Review the portfolio's holdings percentage, with outliers flagged for discrepancies between benchmarks like Refinitiv and Yahoo Finance.
Examine companies of interest to drill down into their ESG outlier scores and see the differences between benchmarks.

The ESG Objective—Traditional ESG investing faced significant challenges, primarily due to inconsistent standards among ESG rating agencies. This stream seeks to establish a real-time, actionable data framework that resolves these inconsistencies, enhancing transparency in rating methodologies and rebuilding investor confidence through reliable, comparable metrics for more informed decision-making.

The Overall Outcomes—The product accelerators we developed transformed clients' innovation approach, reducing time-to-market by 30% and shortening development cycles by six weeks per application. This MVP-driven method lowered costs, allowing for efficient scaling and generating $2 million in annual revenue with strong growth prospects. Beyond financial gains, the initiative fostered a cultural shift, aligning engineering, data science, and design teams and establishing a sustainable framework for ongoing innovation.

The ESG Booster Solution—ESG Booster tackled key challenges in ESG investing by introducing two primary features: Outlier Analysis and Sentiment Analysis. Outlier Analysis addressed inconsistencies in ESG data by identifying discrepancies across rating providers, restoring transparency and data trustworthiness. Sentiment Analysis went beyond historical data, analyzing media tone, controversies, and predicting sentiment trends to help companies anticipate public perception shifts.

The product development process was a collaborative, cross-functional effort managed across global teams in New York, Serbia, and India. As design lead, I coordinated five product pods, driving the project from ideation to execution. Through iterative pilot testing and integrating stakeholder feedback, we refined the product to provide actionable value, fostering innovation and surfacing new product ideas along the way.

Additional products in the suite—

Figure 1.2—VisualRE: The experience features a sentiment analysis tool to monitor loan and property performance, predictive analysis for forecasting defaults and violations, and advanced watchlist tools to track tenant and economic factors. Graph-based tools allow users to intuitively visualize portfolio exposure, risk, and relationships in a single view.

Figure 1.2: VisualRE

Figure 1.3—Digital Compliance: The experience provides continuous regulatory data, automates analysis and categorization of new rules, and includes a searchable Q&A library. Using advanced graph and NLP techniques, it visualizes key regulatory events and tracks document changes over time, empowering compliance officers to manage notices from various agencies for comprehensive compliance oversight..

Figure 1.3: Digital Compliance