At Fold, every payment-related feature required sign-off from a long list of partners: our sponsor bank (Sutton), card issuer processor (Marqeta), card network (Visa), two Bitcoin custodians, and a stack of vendors spanning fraud, KYC, payments, and tax compliance (Persona, Unit21, Sardine, TaxBit, and others). The existing approval process took 4+ weeks per cycle: submit materials, wait, get questions, answer them, wait again. This killed roadmap velocity.
It also produced a worse pattern. Partners would often discover unapproved changes already live in the app and demand same-day fixes. Those asks landed on a compliance function that had no protocol or translation layer to product. The pattern looked like: "Sutton does not approve, change this today." Product would drop everything to ship a copy fix, or worse, an emergency design or UX change with hours of notice. Surprise scrambles became the norm.
What I Built
I rebuilt the system from scratch:
- A living Figma app map maintained by product. It was the first time anyone at Fold had documented the full app surface end to end, and it became the level-setting artifact for every partner conversation, every internal compliance review, and every cross-functional onboarding.
- Direct compliance relationships with each banking partner, bypassing the slow account-management layers that previously sat between us and the people actually making approval calls.
- Explicit approval requirements documented up front: annotated wireframes, user flows, compliance justifications. Partners stopped having to ask for context because we provided it from the start.
- Anticipatory templates that addressed common questions before they were asked.
- Scheduled touchpoints that replaced async back-and-forth, keeping reviews on a predictable cadence.
- An internal compliance guide documenting the patterns partners cared about, so teams stopped designing out-of-compliance features in the first place.
- A forward-looking pipeline so partners always saw what was coming before it shipped, ending the "discovery" pattern entirely.
The Impact
- 75% reduction in approval timeline (4+ weeks to days)
- Zero surprise scrambles: no more "partner found this, fix it today" emergencies
- The Figma app map became a critical internal asset across product, design, support, compliance, and finance
- Every partner relationship benefited: banking, card processing, network, custodians, and the vendor stack all moved faster
- Compliance reframed from a bottleneck into a checkpoint built into design
Why It Mattered
Fold was a Bitcoin-only fintech operating in one of the most heavily scrutinized regulatory contexts in the US, with an unusually wide partner web for a company our size. Partner trust was non-negotiable across all of them. Rebuilding the approval process is how we shipped faster without trading away the partner-trust foundation that ultimately let Fold become the first Bitcoin-only company on Nasdaq.
Skills
Partner management, regulatory navigation, cross-functional process design, stakeholder communication, vendor management, fintech compliance, banking partnerships