ACY Securities Design-system architecture in a high-regulation retail-finance environment

5 product teams. 0 shared design language. Every regulatory update was a full redesign.

Three decisions that defined the architecture

These aren't the decisions that were obvious in hindsight. They're the ones where the alternative was equally valid — until the constraints forced a choice.

150+ components — what that actually means

"150+ components" appears on my resumé and in several case studies. A finance-sector reviewer should ask: what governance backed it? Here is what the design system actually consisted of and how it was maintained.

47 fields, one wall — versus one section at a time

The redesign didn't shorten the regulatory form; ASIC's suitability obligations set the fields. It changed the shape of the ask. Scroll the funnel into view and watch completion recover, stage by stage.

The system, as it shipped

Visual evidence of the design-system foundation and platform interfaces built over 4 years.

Where compliance meets the first ten minutes

Designing the live account-registration flow required navigating ASIC's AFSL obligations directly — PDS, FSG, TMD, and suitability assessment aren't optional checkboxes, they're legal requirements with specific disclosure rules. Every screen was reviewed against ASIC RG 244 and coordinated with the compliance team before development.

The facts, on the record

For a Senior PD or Design Lead interview panel

This case study evidences nearly five years of shipped production design at a regulated ASIC broker: a 150-component design system across five product surfaces, eight regulatory rewrites absorbed at the token layer without rebuild cycles, $2B+ daily volume and 100K+ traders served, KYC completion lifted 27% → 55% with named instrumentation, engineering velocity compressed 3 days/screen → 1.5 days/screen across thirty Jira sprints, brand architecture rebuilt across fourteen sub-brand lockups for a multi-jurisdiction parent. Each load-bearing claim has either an externally citable source (ASIC Public Register, ACY institutional disclosures) or a named internal instrument (GA4, Hotjar, Jira, Mixpanel). Where a number is on this page, the disclosure of how it was measured is either inline or one click away in the linked field notes.

What this case study deliberately does not claim. The 150-component system has not been audited by an external accessibility firm; the certified WCAG 2.1 AA conformance letter has not been commissioned, and the accessibility audit disclosure names six limits and a six-component replication plan. The Finlogix 40%-analysis-time number is from a controlled within-subjects usability study with n = 15, not a population-scale claim — full experimental design, seven limits, and an eight-direction replication plan at the Finlogix methodology disclosure. The ASIC RG 268 cross-border disclosure surface went through three iterations over eighteen months including one v1 failure mode I had not predicted and one pre-launch projection that never materialised — the post-launch iteration note documents the honest negative result. The ACY Connect institutional FIX onboarding cycles involved one specific IT director who actively did not want to migrate — the political-skill note documents his three credible objections and the three verification surfaces that earned adoption.

The disclosure register. The four field notes are the canonical record of what this case study is willing to claim and what it isn't. They are not appendices; they are the evidence layer. If you are evaluating this work for a Senior PD or Design Lead role at an institutional finance firm, the four notes are where the engineering, compliance, and accessibility scepticism your team will bring to a hire decision is met head-on rather than left to chance.