Persona 01
The portfolio lead.
Brings loan data in and evaluates the book. Lives in Excel today and needs messy, inconsistent spreadsheets to import cleanly.
Excel-native
Portfolio
Data import
Veracity
Wandr rebuilt Veracity's design operation from the inside, turning a three-month trial into an open-ended retainer and doubling the embedded team.
FINTECH
·
WEB APPLICATION
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STAFF AUGMENTATION
At a glance
A hard domain. No process. A design operation, rebuilt.
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STARTED
Apr 2025
Staff augmentation
TEAM
2 FT + lead
Senior, embedded
OUTPUT
Design system
Platform, brand, site
TENURE
15+ months
Ongoing retainer
The Client
The technology moving loan trading off spreadsheets.
Veracity Loan Technologies is building a digital platform for trading and managing whole loans, a multi-billion-dollar corner of the mortgage market that still runs largely on email and Excel. Its first tenant is eRESI Mortgage, and it is led by president Tim Wang and CTO Eric Barrow.
The ambition was clear and the domain was brutal, but the company was early: a small, fast-moving org with little design maturity, no product documentation, and an in-house design seat that was not delivering.
eRESI Mortgage
First platform tenant
Multi-tenant
Buyers and sellers
Early-stage
Pre-launch platform
The Challenge
A design operation that had to be built, not inherited.
An early-stage org building in a domain most designers never touch, with little documentation and no validation culture to lean on.
Problem 01
Nothing was written down.
Requirements lived in conversations, not documents. Design became the only place decisions got captured, so the team made user flows the de facto product spec.
Problem 02
Discovery disguised as design.
With no research or validation culture, the org used design iterations to work out what to build, so scope kept shifting even after handoff.
Problem 03
Ownership that collided.
Two product owners often worked the same area at once. Wandr flagged it and helped split ownership so effort stopped doubling up.
Problem 04
An in-house design seat that stalled.
The existing in-house design resource was not keeping pace with the product, so Wandr stepped in to own product design and set the tempo.
Before / After
From ad-hoc screens to a system that scales.
See how the platform changed, from a rigid, single-tenant tool of one-off screens into a cohesive product on a bespoke design system.
Before
After WANDR
Our Role
From a stalled design seat to a documented operation.
01
Embedded senior product design inside the client's team
02
Product-owner-level ownership across core platform areas
03
Learning the mortgage secondary market from scratch
04
User flows as the de facto product specification
05
A discovery-to-validation product process and PRD structure
06
A bespoke atomic design system, replacing an off-the-shelf library
07
Data-dense workflows: portfolio, trade desk, funding, collateral, servicing
08
Company website and brand collateral, from a logo and little else
Research
Before any pixel moved, we mapped the work.
With no product documentation to inherit, Wandr built its own picture of how loan trading works, through the legacy platform, direct user interviews, and flows.
01
1.0
The old platform was the only spec that existed.
Wandr audited the single-tenant 1.0 tool to separate what to keep from what to rebuild, since nothing else was documented.
02
5
Five sessions with a key eRESI user, on the lock desk.
Interviews with a senior user validated assumptions about the highest-stakes workflow, in a domain the team was still learning.
03
Flows
User flows became the source of truth.
With requirements living only in conversations, flows became how the team and client aligned on what to build.
Four teams, one loan moving between them.
Persona 02
The diligence checker.
Runs compliance and reconciliation on each loan, flagging exceptions against tolerances. Needs discrepancies visible and every decision logged.
Compliance
Exceptions
Audit trail
Persona 03
The funder.
Decides which loans to fund and at what price, weighing risk across the book. Needs severity legible at a glance, not buried in a cell.
Funding
Risk
Pricing
Persona 03
The documentation lead.
Handles collateral and documents through the loan lifecycle. Needs the record to hold as loans move between parties.
Collateral
Documents
Governance
Own the operation. Document decisions. Standardize to scale.
01
Own it.
Embed senior designers who take product-area ownership from day one, so the client gets decisions and shipped UI, not a resource to manage.
02
Document it.
Use design and user flows to surface and pin down requirements the org never wrote down, turning discovery-as-design into a repeatable process.
03
Standardize it.
Replace custom-component sprawl with a bespoke design system, so patterns, color, and type stay consistent as the platform grows.
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THE KEY INSIGHT
The problem was never the design. It was the operation.
Veracity had the ambition, the domain, and a hard product to build. What it lacked was a way to make design decisions and hold them: documentation, process, ownership, and a system. Redesigning screens would have fixed a symptom. Building the operation fixed the cause, so the work compounds as the product grows. A better screen ships once. A design operation the team can build on ships continuously, which is why a three-month trial became a standing part of how Veracity builds.
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Outcomes
What the work moved.
Fifteen months in, the outcomes are about trust and operating capability, not launch metrics, since the platform is still pre-launch.
01 · TEAM
1 → 2
Full-time designers embedded
02 · TENURE
3 → 15+
Months, trial to standing team
03 · MODEL
Trial → Open
Fixed pilot to open-ended retainer
04 · SYSTEM
0 → 1
Bespoke design system, built to scale
Client Voice
In their words.
“
We brought Wandr in for three months to steady our design, and they ended up shaping how we build product. They learned a genuinely hard domain, took ownership, and earned enough trust that we kept expanding the team. They are the group we did not want to give back.
Tim Wang
President, Veracity Loan Technologies
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