Frank started life as a loan matching service for small businesses. We built a conversational intake that asked a business owner eight simple questions and matched their answers against over 570 lenders. It worked, but the more conversations we had with our users, the clearer it became that most of them didn't really want a loan. They wanted breathing room in their cash flow and a lot less paperwork.

So we made a hard call and retired loans completely. Instead we focused on the Frank Card, a business card built for tradespeople and small business owners. The people we were designing for aren't sitting at desks. They're on a job site with a phone in one hand. That one insight shaped almost every decision that followed.

I led design and product on Frank from the start, and I was also hands on in building a large part of it. Working this way let us move extremely quickly. We could put an idea in front of real users in the morning and change it based on what they did by the afternoon.

We wanted Frank to feel like a person rather than a bank. Financial products for small businesses tend to be either cold and corporate or overly playful, and neither earns much trust. Frank needed to be confident and competent, but also warm and plain spoken. It's the friend who happens to understand money.

This meant conversation became the main interface. Wherever a traditional product would show a long form, Frank asks a question. Wherever a traditional product would say "declined", Frank explains why and what would change the answer.

The sign-up flow combines the founding member funnel and business verification in one place, so applicants never feel like they're starting over halfway through. On desktop they build their card in 3D as they go, which turned a compliance process into something people actually enjoyed finishing. Founding members were given a numbered serial, a small touch that made signing up early feel like joining something.

Getting documents from people is where most financial onboarding falls apart, so we designed that part with a lot of care. Applicants can connect their bank directly or upload statements, and Frank reads every document as it comes in. If an ID is the back instead of the front, or a statement is too old, Frank tells them straight away and explains exactly what's needed. We don't wait a week to email them.

Behind the card is an underwriting system that reads bank statements and licences the way an experienced analyst would. It categorises spending, tells a cash advance apart from a loan, and works out a safe number the business can comfortably spend each month. That becomes the Trust score, a single figure from 0 to 100 used everywhere a decision is shown.

A big part of the design work here was about honesty. AI that reads documents is only useful if people can trust what it says. Early on we found that a sideways photo of an ID would be read with complete confidence but completely wrong, and that one misread digit on an expiry date could block a perfectly valid licence. So we designed the system to straighten documents before reading them, to require two agreeing reads before calling anything expired, and to check names letter by letter. That brought false name mismatches down from 84 to 28 genuine cases.

Every decision is written to an audit trail that can't be edited later, so there's always a clear record of what Frank decided and why.

Once someone is a customer, Frank works for them over text. A tradesperson can send a photo of a job and get a quote back, with materials priced locally. Frank remembers what it has been told, sends the invoice, and on day 30 texts to ask whether the customer has paid. If they haven't, Frank sends a polite chase email for them.

We also built a Talk to Frank assistant for the website. It answers account and support questions, and if something needs a human, it flags the account to the team so nobody falls through the cracks.

To help explain all of this to investors and partners, I designed an iMessage-style product demo. It walks through a full month in the life of a customer, from setting up the card and reading a licence to quoting, invoicing, scheduling and putting idle cash to work.

Internally the team works from a single view of every account, whether that person came in through a phone call, an email or the card flow. Every account uses the same three-column profile, with documents, analysis, communications and the audit trail sitting side by side.

The admin has a deliberately restrained visual language. It's a dark interface built on two metals: gold for anything that's good, earned or approved, and silver for anything neutral or in progress, plus a warm clay for caution and red for danger. Stripping it back to so few colours means that when something is gold, the team knows at a glance that it matters.