FIELD NOTES · INSTITUTIONAL FINANCE DESIGN · PUBLISHED MONTHLY

Field Notes

Practitioner writing on trading, compliance, and regulated platform UX. Shorter than a case study, longer than a tweet. One note per month, drawn from work on FIX 4.4 execution, MiFID II best-ex, ASIC RG 268 disclosure, and KYC / AML onboarding.

4 notes · latest first

All field notes

2026-04-18 · KYC · AML · Onboarding Why KYC Drop-Off Spikes at EDD The baseline KYC funnel works. Enhanced Due Diligence is where it falls apart. The fix is not to shorten a regulatory requirement — it is to change how the questions are presented. Read note → 2026-04-15 · ASIC · Cross-border disclosure ASIC RG 268 Cross-Border Disclosure — Three UX Patterns ASIC RG 268 requires retail clients to see jurisdiction-specific disclosures before each transaction. Three patterns keep recurring. One of them wins in production almost every time. Read note → 2026-04-08 · MiFID II · Best execution Designing MiFID II Best-Execution Reports for Buy-Side PMs MiFID II Article 27 forces firms to prove best execution. The default output is a PDF nobody reads. Here is what a portfolio manager actually needs on the screen. Read note → 2026-04-01 · FIX protocol · Institutional trading Why FIX 4.4 Latency Dictates Order Entry Form Design When an order ticket has a 10ms round-trip budget, the whole form-design playbook you learned from consumer apps goes in the bin. At ACY Securities I spent four years inside that disorientation. Read note →

Why field notes

Case studies do one job — they prove a body of work exists and it shipped. They are the wrong shape for a different job: showing how a practitioner thinks through a specific regulatory or execution problem when it is actively on the desk. Field notes are that shape. One problem, 800 words, with the pattern I landed on and the ones I rejected.

The audience is other practitioners — hiring managers, design directors, and engineers at institutional finance firms who want to know whether the person writing understands the domain deeply enough to argue about it in a review. I write one of these a month. Subscribe via LinkedIn if you want them in your feed.

Where to go next

  • All case studies — the shipped work behind the notes.
  • Compliance approach — how I treat regulatory obligations as a product surface rather than a legal artefact.
  • Data verification — how I source, cite, and audit the quantitative claims in financial UI.
  • About Ed — four years at ACY Securities, institutional finance design across 40+ jurisdictions.