From UX design to asset servicing
Krina Rathod, product designer at Smartstream, discusses her move from UX design in B2B and B2C SaaS into asset servicing. Trained as a UX designer, she was drawn to the industry by how much of it still runs on legacy interfaces and manual workarounds, despite underlying problems such as reconciliation, reporting, and data accuracy that are genuinely complex from a design perspective.
Design as a lever for operational risk
Rathod argues design has scope to reduce operational risk, not just improve appearance, through fewer manual errors, faster exception handling, and less reliance on institutional memory. She points to Smart Reconciliations as an example of a platform where design decisions serve users who repeat operational workflows hundreds of times a day. Her onboarding began with business context before tools, followed by small real assignments and regular check-ins to catch gaps early.
Advice for the next generation
Looking ahead, she wants to move from designing individual products to shaping design strategy across financial infrastructure as a whole. Her advice to graduates entering the industry: prioritise curiosity over prior domain knowledge, get close to real users early, and be patient, since depth in financial services takes time even though core design skills transfer everywhere.
