SG Primary Firm Order – Subscription Flow

Timeline

January - February 2025 (2 months)

My role

As the sole designer in the company, I led the end-to-end design process for the deal configuration experience across both investor-facing (web and mobile) platforms and internal systems. I collaborated closely with product managers, engineers, and key stakeholders—especially the PCM (Private Capital Markets) team—to understand the diverse deal structures and translate them into a flexible, scalable design solution.

Key Responsibilities

• Discovery & Collaboration

 Partnered with the PM and PCM team to understand business needs, uncover edge cases, and define how a configurable deal structure could adapt to different investment scenarios.

• Feature Scoping & Prioritisation

 Worked with the PM to scope features and define phased rollouts based on technical constraints and business urgency.

• Design Execution

 Created detailed user flows, identified edge cases, and crafted high-fidelity UI designs in Figma for both the frontend and internal admin tools.

Opportunity & Context

This project aimed to enable firm order subscriptions for Singapore Primary Deals, where investments are defined by monetary value rather than the number of shares. The solution needed to serve both investor-facing and internal operations needs, spanning across Aprime (external platform) and Atlas (internal tool used by PCM and Ops teams).

Objectives

• Allow PCM to define primary deals based on investment amount, expanding beyond share-based subscriptions.

• Enable investors to input firm investment commitments, with clear visibility into their subscription status via the platform.

• Equip internal teams with the tools to efficiently manage payment tracking, fee and GST calculations, and progress monitoring.

Problem

The existing system had several limitations that hindered both investor experience and internal efficiency:

• Lack of support for investment by amount: The platform only allowed subscriptions based on the number of shares, in line with older business requirements, making it incompatible with SG Primary Deals where investment is defined by amount.

• Inflexible fee and discount handling: There was no way to customise or apply discounts on fees per investor. Any updates had to be communicated manually, causing delays and misalignment.

• Missing GST logic based on investor profile: The system didn’t support automated GST application or exemption based on investor type. The PCM team had to manually adjust GST-related information for each investor.

These limitations resulted in a confusing experience for investors and added significant manual workload for internal teams, increasing the risk of errors and inefficiencies.

Business Goal

To enable investors to confidently subscribe to SG primary deals by amount and understand the full cost structure (fees + GST), while equipping internal teams to handle order management and payment tracking more efficiently.

The Challenge

• Designing a seamless subscription experience while introducing new business logic (investment by amount, dynamic GST, etc.)

• Aligning two platforms (Aprime and Atlas) to handle one end-to-end flow

• Planning fallback logic without blocking the main order flow

Solution

We designed a scalable, cross-platform solution that aligned product, PCM, operations, and compliance goals to improve the end-to-end firm order experience.

1. Introduced Investment-by-Amount Flow (Investor-Facing: Aprime)

• Shifted from a legacy share-based model to a cleaner, amount-based investment input

• Designed a new firm order modal that transparently displays investment value, fee structure, and GST applicability

• Provided real-time feedback to investors on order submission status and next steps—enhancing investor trust and self-service

2. Built Operational Support & Control Panel (Internal-Facing: Atlas)

• Empowered operations teams to edit fees and discounts dynamically, with guardrails to prevent miscalculations

• Implemented business logic to auto-determine GST applicability based on nationality, residency, and incorporation data

• Added capability to update payment statuses post-submission and initiate structured follow-ups (emails, reminders)

Impact

• Improved investor decision-making by clearly displaying fees, GST, and order details upfront—reducing confusion and support queries.

• Enabled seamless support for local and international investors through automated GST logic—minimizing manual corrections and back-and-forth post-submission.

• Empowered internal teams to update fees and order statuses directly in Atlas, with real-time changes reflected on the investor platform and email notifications triggered automatically.

• Established a single source of truth for subscription data—setting the foundation for future automation in settlement workflows and investor communications.
  Future-proofed the subscription flow by designing modular logic that supports upcoming mobile rollouts and extended deal types.

My takeaway

1. Designing for business logic requires deep domain understanding. Working on investment-by-amount, GST rules, and fee logic taught me that behind every “simple” UI lies complex operational logic that must be understood, not just accommodated.

2. Cross-functional communication is a design skill. Much of my role involved facilitating alignment between product, ops, compliance, and engineering — translating constraints into workable design flows while keeping the user experience clean.



3. Design doesn’t stop at handoff. I stayed closely involved during implementation to ensure design intent was preserved, especially for edge cases involving different investor types, fallback logic, and real-time data display.



4. Reusability brings long-term leverage. By modularising the fee/GST/status components, we’ve created a scalable pattern that can be applied across other flows like secondaries, syndicates, or even future geographies.



5. Internal tools deserve just as much UX care. Designing Atlas wasn’t just about admin efficiency — it was about reducing mistakes, surfacing the right controls, and giving ops confidence to take action without engineering support.



6. Real impact happens when design meets operations. This project reinforced that great product experiences happen not only through clean UIs, but by solving actual pain points for users and the internal teams supporting them.

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Research

To ensure the new flow met business needs and user expectations, I worked closely with multiple stakeholders across functions:

PMs: Scoped the transition from share-based to amount-based logic, mapped dependencies between Aprime and Atlas.
Compliance & Legal: Clarified rules around GST applicability based on nationality, incorporation, and residency.
Ops & BOps: Identified edge cases and pain points, such as partial funding, fee overrides, and communication gaps.
Tech leads: Mapped existing platform limitations and possibilities for real-time updates and phased deployment.
Support data: Reviewed investor feedback, operational logs, and manual handling records to shape fallback logic and UI priorities.

User story

Before deciding on Onfido, the PM worked closely with the compliance team to explore various eKYC and Identity Verification (IDV) providers, evaluating which solution best met our regulatory and operational needs.

After selecting Onfido and researching other platforms, the PM and I collaborated to define user stories—ensuring we understood both user and compliance requirements for a smooth and effective integration.

Phrases breakdown

After discussing with the PM, we decided to split this initiative into two phases:

1. Aprime and Atlas (Internal Platform)

2. Mobile apps

Since Aprime and Atlas work together as a complete flow to support the KYC verification process, they need to be launched as a set. The mobile apps will follow in the second phase.

Design consideration

• Designed both Aprime and Atlas flows in parallel, ensuring end-to-end logic consistency

• Created modular UI components (fee breakdown, status display, GST tag) for reusability

• Used progressive disclosure to avoid overwhelming users while still surfacing all necessary info

• Prioritised mobile scalability in component layout and system logic, even though mobile UI was out of scope in this phase

• Prototyped fallback and edge case screens to ensure clarity even in non-ideal scenarios (e.g., GST disputes, partial top-ups)

User flow & Design (on Aprime)

There are several key considerations I kept in mind while reviewing the user flow:

1. How to seamlessly integrate Onfido into our process without disrupting the overall experience

2. Where to place fallback options if users fail the verification

3. Whether the retrieved data should be stored and displayed if users leave the page halfway through

User flow & Design (on Atlas)

The key function of how this is used on Atlas is to help the Compliance team easily access investor information and identify its source—especially since we have multiple types of users.

 Some of the main concerns we considered during the design process were:

1. How did the user go through the onboarding process—was it manual, via Singpass, or through Onfido?

2. How can Compliance view the full set of information retrieved from both Singpass and Onfido?

These were critical to ensuring clarity and traceability within the internal platform.