Mastercard Money Laundering platform
Helping financial institutions identify money laundering more effectively
Brief
The estimated amount of global money laundering is US$2 trillion a year, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. Financial institutions face heavy fines, for non-compliance. In 2020 alone, banks were fined $14.21 billion globally.
Mastercard helps combat money laundering activities with this new tool, as part of their Financial Crime Solutions.
This B2B Saas software enables financial analysts to easily detect and investigate money laundering activities.
Using machine learning and leveraging data from both card and account based transactions, the algorithm is trained to detect suspicious card transactions at lightning-fast speed.
Data sets
In collaboration with Mastercard, we analyzed the provided data sets and established correlations between column data. By prioritizing key data sets and maintaining open communication with the Mastercard team, we developed a more efficient and effective financial analysis tool that provides a comprehensive view of the most critical data.
My Role
Working collaboratively with the account designer, Mastercards' product managers, analysts and other financial partners I acted as a senior UX designer, researcher, UI designer and information architect.
Main Challenges
The initial goal was to design directly for Mastercard's financial partners. However, limited access to end users during the early stages meant the team relied on feedback from Mastercard analysts, many of whom had prior experience working within banks. While this provided valuable domain expertise, additional validation with financial institutions was essential.
Following a contract extension, the team expanded research efforts and conducted testing with end users, enabling further refinement of the product and ensuring the experience aligned with real investigative workflows.
What I did
As part of the core design team, I contributed to the experience from early wireframes through high-fidelity prototypes and collaborated closely with stakeholders to define the user testing strategy. Through multiple rounds of testing and rapid iteration, we refined the experience to improve usability and support faster investigation workflows.
The product inherited components from several existing Mastercard design systems. Testing revealed a number of usability issues: users struggled to prioritise information, colours intended to indicate urgency created confusion, and some visualisations contained more information than users could comfortably process. I redesigned several charts and interaction patterns to improve clarity and enable faster comprehension.
Insights gathered through user research also led us to simplify the dashboard experience. Analysts and executives were able to quickly identify trends and prioritise transactions requiring further investigation, while detailed filtering and search capabilities supported deeper analysis when needed.
Results
The platform became part of Mastercard's Financial Crime Solutions offering and is used by financial institutions to support the detection and investigation of suspicious activity. Through continuous user testing and iteration, the team delivered an experience that helped analysts prioritise critical information and investigate transactions more efficiently.
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