Ed Chen

ACY Securities

One design system. 5 live platforms. Eight regulatory updates. Zero structural reworks.

Lead designer across five product lines at an ASIC-regulated broker — 100K+ active traders, 40+ jurisdictions, supporting $2B+ in daily trading volume. Working directly with the CEO, CFO, Legal, and three engineering teams at ACY Securities. I built a 150+ component system where teams ship without coming back to me for every edge case. KYC onboarding drop-off fell from 73% to 45% (Mixpanel, 90 days post-launch) — that's more funded accounts, not just a better task score. The system has absorbed 8 regulatory changes at 3–5 days each, against the 3–4 week rebuilds that came before it.

Still building: I work directly with leadership on product direction. The design system has survived 8 regulatory updates, 3 engineering team changes, and expansion to 40+ countries — that durability is the return on building for governance rather than aesthetics.

2024 — team restructured: After the design team downsized, I maintained delivery across all 5 product lines by integrating AI into the workflow — copy variants, asset resizing, code scaffolding. All UX decisions, compliance logic, and governance stayed manual. The system's self-serve documentation made this possible.

Christie's Real Estate

Editorial Platform — I handled design, development, and product decisions

Sole designer and product owner for Christie's International Real Estate editorial platform — 9 months, five global offices, $5M–$80M property buyers. I handled design, development, and stakeholder coordination end-to-end. The challenge: translating 260 years of print brand standards into a digital product without compromising a single weight, colour, or whitespace ratio.

Sole designer, developer, and product owner. When the brief said "web engineer," I built the product. When the brief outgrew engineering, I ran the product. Five offices, competing deadlines, one person — nine months.

ACY Connect

FIX 4.4 documentation for institutional clients — where a misconfigured message is a million-dollar position sizing error

Designed the documentation and onboarding system for ACY's institutional FIX 4.4 API — the protocol that connects prime brokers, liquidity providers, and institutional clients. Five different types of users (from product managers to market data engineers) all need to understand the same system differently. I designed that experience. This work later became the foundation for TradeX.

Why this was hard: A misconfigured FIX message doesn't show an error on screen — it quietly creates a million-dollar position sizing mistake while the market keeps moving. The design target was self-serve integration: a hedge fund engineer should be able to go from first API key to production order flow without a support ticket. Documentation precise enough for developers, clear enough for business people — same system, completely different needs. Integration time dropped from 3 weeks to 1 week; support tickets dropped 67%.

Finlogix

Real-Time Market Analytics · Modular Widget System · ASIC Regulated

Trading analytics platform handling 1,000+ real-time data points. I designed a modular widget system so traders could arrange their workspace the way they actually think — not the way a product manager assumed they should. Tested with 15 active traders in controlled sessions. Order placement went from 8.2 seconds to 2.9 seconds. 67% built custom layouts within 3 months (platform analytics, Q4 2023).

The research behind it: Tested with 15 active traders in controlled sessions (paired within-subjects — each person tried both old and new). Order placement went from 8.2s to 2.9s. The large effect isn't surprising — we consolidated a 6-step flow into 2 steps, and the statistical analysis confirmed it was genuine, not noise (p<0.001). The more useful finding was identifying which steps caused the delay: confirmation modal and instrument search. That insight drove the redesign, not the aggregate number.