Traditional expense management systems are bureaucratic, have extensive steps and work at the slow pace of large enterprises. 

This levels of checks and monitoring might be necessary in large organizations, but startups with team sizes less than 100 need better solutions, free of this legacy baggage.

For smaller spends, it's not very different, the process of verifying, reconciling and reimbursing works within the same systems.

Large vendors can absorb some delays in payments, but individual employees shouldn't have to wait two months to be paid for the dinner they bought a prospect. 

As a startup building from scratch, we had the huge advantage of being able to address this context of needs to a T. 

By putting startup culture in the center of our design process, we were able to become South-east Asia's preferred startup banking service almost instantaneously.

We have a basic V1 already functioning, and the first step in this project was to build consensus on goals for the cards product.

After a short research print, data analysis and gathering feedback from customer-service agents, I outlined the problems that could be addressed by the product team.

Understandably, the business team hadn't considered how the physical cards will be represented on the app, adding a layer of complexity. 

In the initial explorations, I developed solutions that were incremental. 

However, we were unable to proceed with any of these solutions due to one of these reasons:

1. Card visual was regulated by visa and we couldn't be as experimental as we liked.

2. Key problem of accommodating physical cards had not been solved yet.

At this point, I decided to zoom out from the framework that had been shipped in V1 and analyze the problem afresh.

I took the approach of meeting user needs at different stages of decision making, and designing the information architecture to respond to those needs directly.

Designed a sleeve graphic that could be used flexibly for both vertical and horizontal orientations.

Developed design system for new elements and ensured that they perform well in all contexts.

This had been one of the most common queries to customer support:

"How do I find my card number?"

The white tab labelled "show card number" was easily overlooked and caused a lot of confusion to users. 

In this segment, I explore different approaches to highlight this interaction and add clear affordances. 

I had recently implemented budgets and card limits on individual virtual cards, and took this opportunity to develop the design elements to communicate card status on all card pages. 

Flow for configuring a new physical card.