Meridian Financial Platform
- Client
- Meridian Capital Group
- Year
- 2025
- Category
- Digital Product
- Services
- UX/UI Design, Mobile Development, Brand Strategy, Design Systems
The Challenge
Meridian Capital Group had been operating with a legacy trading platform that was powerful under the hood but deeply alienating to its growing base of retail investors. The interface was dense, jargon-heavy, and required significant onboarding just to execute basic portfolio management tasks. User attrition was climbing steadily — down 23% over 18 months — and the executive team knew they were losing ground to nimbler fintech competitors.
Our engagement began with a comprehensive audit spanning six weeks of user research, stakeholder interviews, and technical discovery. We mapped every friction point across the customer journey, from account creation through to advanced trading features, identifying 142 discrete usability issues and categorizing them by severity and frequency.
Our Approach
Rather than a surface-level visual refresh, we proposed a ground-up reimagination of the platform's information architecture. Working in close collaboration with Meridian's product and compliance teams, we developed a layered progressive disclosure system that surfaces only what each user needs at their current skill level.
The design system we built — internally dubbed "Lumen" — introduced a modular component library with over 280 tokens, 64 components, and full dark-mode parity. Every element was stress-tested against WCAG 2.1 AA standards and validated through three rounds of usability testing with real investors ranging from first-time users to day traders.
On the engineering front, we migrated from a monolithic jQuery codebase to a React-based micro-frontend architecture, enabling independent deployment of features and reducing time-to-market for new capabilities from months to weeks. The mobile experience was built natively on Swift and Kotlin, sharing a common design language but optimized for each platform's interaction paradigms.
The Results
Within three months of launch, Meridian saw a 47% increase in daily active users and a 62% reduction in support tickets related to navigation and task completion. The new onboarding flow — a guided interactive walkthrough that adapts to user behavior — cut time-to-first-trade from an average of 4.2 days to just 38 minutes.
The platform has since been recognized with a Red Dot Design Award and was featured in Fast Company's Innovation by Design issue. More importantly, it has become the foundation for Meridian's next generation of financial products, including their recently announced AI-assisted portfolio advisor.
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“SGWX didn't just redesign our platform — they fundamentally rethought how our users interact with their financial lives. The results speak for themselves, but what impressed us most was the rigor of their process and their ability to navigate the complexity of financial regulations without compromising on the user experience.”