# Vesna Planko > Principal Product Designer · Payments & AI Infrastructure · Ex-Galileo (SoFi), PwC · $26B+ in transactions designed Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/vesnaplanko I make money movement simple and AI decisions legible — for the operators your business depends on. 15+ years designing the financial infrastructure products that operators actually trust: payment configuration, settlement dashboards, treasury workflows, and AI explainability for non-technical stakeholders. I embed with your team, ship the hard screens, and leave the system better than I found it. Most fintech design optimizes for end users. I design for the operator — the person configuring payout rules, tracing flagged transactions, and making sense of what the AI just decided. What I’ve shipped: Galileo (SoFi): Redesigned card issuing, settlement, and payout systems processing $26B+ annually. Reduced manual intervention by 90%. Built the enterprise design system from scratch. PwC — TaxVerse: Led 0-to-1 product design through acquisition by Avalara (subsequently purchased by Vista Equity for $8.4B). Turned 12,000 tax jurisdictions into a product that felt simple. PwC — ModelEdge: Designed an AI governance platform managing models. Made opaque AI decisions contestable before “AI explainability” had a name. Treasure Finance: Rebuilt a retention-killing dashboard from the ground up. Fund transfers +46% Q/Q, deposit-to-withdrawal ratio nearly doubled. Currently exploring: Agentic UX patterns, AI-native financial workflows, and the intersection of design velocity and revenue attribution. Open to fractional engagements (2–4 days/week), advisory, and full-time Staff/Principal IC roles in payments, fintech, or AI infrastructure. ## Work Experience ### Principal Product Designer (Fractional) @ Form & Tide (AI Design Consulting) Jan 2025 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area Strategic product design practice focused on payments, AI infrastructure, and financial workflows. I embed with teams navigating complex product problems — from agentic system design to enterprise compliance UX. Current engagements: - Vigil (Fintech AI Hub): Architecting a 0-to-1 AI platform for fintech data orchestration. Designing explainability UX (XAI) that allows CFOs and compliance officers to audit complex data lineage through natural language interfaces. Connecting Stripe, Plaid, and Marqeta into an auditable intelligence layer. - DesignProof (Measurement Intelligence): Building an intelligence platform that correlates design velocity with revenue and retention signals — turning design’s biggest attribution problem into a CFO-ready financial framework. ### Principal Product Designer | CEO @ Habitual. Jan 2021 – Jan 2025 | San Francisco Bay Area Fractional product design practice serving fintech and financial infrastructure clients. Led end-to-end design strategy from research through shipped product. Key engagements: - Treasure Finance: Redesigned the entire dashboard experience for a cash management platform. Customers couldn’t see their returns, so they stopped depositing. Rebuilt the overview around confidence signals — total AUM, separated pending deposits/withdrawals, monthly return breakdowns. Fund transfers increased 46% Q/Q. Deposit-to-withdrawal ratio nearly doubled. - Sodexo, TaxAct, Coinage, and others: Product design strategy, research, and shipped interfaces across financial services and consumer finance. ### Principal Product Designer @ Galileo Financial Technologies Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco Bay Area - Redesigned card issuing, settlement, and payout systems processing $26B+ annually across 100M+ accounts. Reduced manual intervention by 90%. - Built the enterprise design system from scratch — establishing a scalable framework for design consistency across the platform. - Elevated user satisfaction by multiple NPS score points through strategic UX improvements to operator-facing tools. - Shipped the hard screens: payout configuration, settlement dashboards, transaction tracing — the infrastructure operators depend on daily. ### Design Leadership Forum Member @ InVision Jan 2018 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco Bay Area Our mission is to advance the practice of design leadership by fostering a community where the world’s best can learn from one another. We strive to make the Forum inclusive and relevant to those confronting the challenges of leading design teams. ### Lead UI/UX Designer @ Security First. Jan 2013 – Jan 2022 | London Area, United Kingdom - Designed and scaled digital security applications for Human Rights Defenders in high-risk contexts across Android, iOS, and web (Umbrella app). - 130K users across platforms. 4.8 rating on iOS, 4.0 on Android. - The discipline of designing where product failure has real human consequences carries directly into financial infrastructure work — show the state clearly, confirm the action explicitly, never leave someone wondering what happened. ### Lead Product Designer | PwC Product & Technology @ PwC Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco Bay Area ModelEdge (AI Governance Platform): - Led 0-to-1 design of an enterprise platform that made opaque AI decisions contestable, traceable, and governed for compliance officers who couldn’t see, understand, or audit the models they were responsible for. - Platform managed models with real-time status tracking, risk tier visualization, and enterprise-wide metadata. - Cut model development cycles by 50–67%. Approval time from one month to roughly two weeks. - 109 hours of direct customer research across large banks, regional institutions, and fintechs. 145 stakeholder interviews. ### Lead Product Designer | PwC New Ventures @ PwC Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area TaxVerse (Acquired by Avalara → Vista Equity Partners, $8.4B): - Led product design from first sketch to shipped platform for a tax compliance product covering 12,000+ US jurisdictions. Zero existing product, zero design team, zero design system at start. - Designed interactive nexus mapping, guided determination workflows, smart data ingestion across 65+ financial systems, and a compliance dashboard that reframed the experience from “am I in trouble?” to “here’s exactly where I stand.” - 75% less time on tax determination. User satisfaction score increased by +28 points. Product line scaled from 3 to 15 products in 18 months. - 100+ contextual inquiry sessions. Managed 5 UX designers and strategists. ### Design Mentor @ Designlab Jan 2015 – Jan 2019 Mentoring user experience (UX) design students with the goal of setting them up for success in their Designlab coursework and in their careers. ### Senior UX Designer @ App Annie Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area Directed the design of a headline feature on the 2017 product roadmap. Partnered with UX research to ensure design decisions were informed by usability data. ### Lead UX/UI @ Moni Technologies Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 | London Area, United Kingdom Designed 0-to-1 a peer-to-peer money transfer app. Techstars London inaugural cohort. Cross-platform implementation from concept to market. ### Design and Technical Lead @ HER Social App Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | London Area, United Kingdom -Led design strategy, research, and UX/UI for iOS and Android. Won Best Design Award at LAUNCH Festival 2014 San Francisco - Participated in the YCombinator S15 batch, capitalizing on the accelerator's resources to refine strategic approaches and engage with influential stakeholders, facilitating rapid scaling and operational excellence. ### Designer @ Lorem ipsum Jan 2006 – Jan 2014 UX/UI design for major Slovenian banks and post offices. Digital transformation, new business channels, and user engagement across regulated financial services. ## Education ### Master's degree in Information Science in the Contemporary Society Faculty of information studies ### CPD - UCL Advances & Mobile Monday Mobile Masterclass The Mobile Academy ### Sustainability MEX ### Marketing Faculty of Economics and Business ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/vesnaplanko --- Source: https://flows.cv/vesnaplanko JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/vesnaplanko/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-13