Money Movement Orchestration

Designing an intelligent experience layer that routes payments across multiple financial rails.

Senior Director of Design | Capital One | 2026

The Problem

Customers move money across a variety of financial rails, including ACH, RTP, Zelle, Wires, and Cards.

However, each rail operates with its own rules, limitations, and user flows.

This created fragmented experiences where customers had to understand:

  • which payment rail to choose

  • eligibility requirements for each rail

  • transaction limits and settlement speeds

  • different interaction patterns across products

For many customers, the complexity of these systems surfaced directly in the experience. Instead of moving money intuitively, customers were forced to make technical decisions about financial infrastructure.

My Role

I led the design strategy for rethinking how customers interact with money movement across Capital One’s payments ecosystem.

The goal was to create a unified experience layer capable of intelligently routing transactions across rails while maintaining transparency and trust for customers.

Key responsibilities included:

  • defining the product vision for cross-rail orchestration

  • aligning stakeholders across multiple payment platforms

  • facilitating strategic design workshops to explore platform direction

  • guiding the design team through concept development and prototyping

  • partnering with engineering to define platform architecture

The Strategy

Rather than designing experiences around individual payment rails, we reframed the problem around customer intent.

Customers don’t think in terms of ACH or RTP. They simply want to move money quickly, safely, and reliably.

Our strategy focused on designing an intelligent orchestration layer that could:

  • understand the context of a transaction

  • determine the most appropriate rail

  • surface recommendations when helpful

  • simplify the experience without hiding important details

This allowed the system to absorb infrastructure complexity while keeping the experience intuitive.

Key Decisions

Progressive Disclosure

Payment rail complexity was only surfaced when necessary.

Most transactions could be completed through a simple flow, while advanced options remained available for customers who needed more control.

Capability-Based Architecture

Rather than organizing experiences around payment types, we structured the platform around core capabilities:

  • sending money

  • requesting money

  • depositing funds

  • transferring between accounts

This allowed the experience to remain consistent regardless of which rail executed the transaction.

Context-Aware Recommendations

The system leveraged transaction context to recommend the most appropriate payment rail based on factors like speed, cost, and eligibility.

This improved customer confidence while reducing decision friction.

Execution

Execution required coordination across multiple product and engineering teams responsible for different payment rails.

Key activities included:

  • facilitating cross-team alignment workshops

  • mapping capability architecture across payment platforms

  • developing rapid prototypes to explore orchestration concepts

  • collaborating with engineering to define platform integration points

  • aligning the experience with broader design system standards

Leadership Impact

This work helped establish a long-term vision for how money movement could evolve into a unified platform experience.

Key outcomes included:

  • alignment across payment teams around a shared orchestration strategy

  • reduced complexity in cross-rail payment experiences

  • a scalable architecture for expanding future payment capabilities

  • a clearer experience model for customers interacting with multiple rails

The System Architecture Behind the Work

The orchestration layer sits above the individual payment rails and determines how transactions are executed.

This structure allows the platform to scale while keeping the customer experience simple.

Leadership Reflection

Complex financial ecosystems require experience design that starts with platform architecture.

By aligning teams around a shared orchestration model, we were able to simplify the customer experience while maintaining the flexibility needed for a large-scale payments ecosystem.