Meridian

Mid-market finance teams run treasury out of spreadsheets stitched together from a dozen bank portals. Cash position is always a day stale, forecasting lives in someone's private workbook, and the answer to "can we cover payroll and the acquisition this month?" takes a morning of reconciliation to produce.

My client was building a treasury platform to replace that workflow and needed the core product designed from the ground up — from discovery research through build-ready screens. I led product design end to end, embedded with the founding team and their finance advisors.

• Discovery Research
• Information Architecture
• Task Flows
• Product Design
• Design System

Contextual inquiry and interviews with twelve mid-market CFOs, treasury analysts, and controllers over five weeks — watching them run the morning cash ritual, build forecasts, and approve payments in the tools they actually use.

A consolidated cash position that reads as a single answer, with data freshness stated on the record — a "live vs. stale" pattern that became a core principle. A 13-week forecast built for the board conversation, not the spreadsheet. Covenant monitoring with early-warning thresholds so a breach is a heads-up, not a surprise. And multi-party approval chains that mirror how finance teams actually sign off.

The whole surface is honest about what it doesn't know. When a feed is stale, it says so — because in treasury, a confident wrong number is worse than an honest gap.

The six screens that carry the product — from the CFO's portfolio view to the controller's covenant monitor. Every number states its freshness, every workflow has a primary action, and payment approval is enforced across three people, never one.