Consolidating legacy products into one authentication foundation

Problem

FIS ran several legacy banking products, each with its own way of logging in and enrolling. The pre-login experience was fragmented across separate product teams: inconsistent flows, duplicated work, gaps no one owned. The mandate was structural. Consolidate authentication and enrollment into one framework that could scale across the company and support a white-label strategy, owned by one team responsible for the whole function instead of a slice of it. It was the first cross-product initiative at FIS, and the first to move the team from designing per product to designing per function. Scope shifted constantly as priorities and compliance requirements changed.

Role

I owned the design end to end: contributing to the PRD, taking flows and wireframes through to high fidelity, handing off to engineering, then leading QA and post-handoff support. This was also the first project to apply the new enterprise design system across a whole experience, so I was pressure-testing the system as I built with it.

Process

Decisions that held the system together. Two calls stand out.

When a late change removed the welcome screen, it took the enrollment entry point with it. Rather than block the timeline, I moved enrollment onto the sign-in screen. It solved the problem without adding scope.

The second was a security argument. To avoid revealing which field was wrong, I pushed for generic, form-level error messages instead of field-level indicators. The design-systems team pushed back, so I worked through the form-level versus field-level validation feasibility with engineering, made the security case in their office hours, and got the change supported and shipped.

I also designed for cases before anyone asked for them: tailored error states for users who were already enrolled versus those with invalid credentials, and web layouts alongside the mobile-first work so the later web phase could build on a foundation instead of starting cold.

Design

Web carried more weight than mobile. First-time users had to clear an external security-token setup on the way in, while we moved the login onto a modern identity platform underneath. The risk was cognitive overload at the exact wrong moment. Instead of guessing at a layout, I ran a validation session across three directions, single column, two column, and a hybrid, testing first-time login and token setup in each. I recommended single column: it lowered cognitive load, read more clearly step to step, and made the handoff into the security setup feel continuous rather than jarring.

Quality

Shipping something this large clean meant treating QA as design work. I built a defect tracker that broke every issue down by component, defect type, and responsible team, so nothing slipped between groups.

Outcome

The framework became the reference point for authentication and enrollment across the organization, cited in stakeholder readouts and picked up by adjacent initiatives, and it anchored the white-label strategy. The three components I contributed (a radio group, a progress tracker, and a password checklist) are still in use across teams.