L&G — Pension Contribution Platform

Redesigning a critical financial system for tens of thousands of pension scheme members

The Problem

Legal & General's pension contribution platform was failing the people who depended on it. HR administrators and finance teams were spending hours uploading contribution files, navigating a system with poor error handling and little transparency into what was actually happening. For scheme members, the experience was confusing and disengaging, making it genuinely difficult for people to understand their own financial future.

The brief was clear: rebuild the platform, without breaking the regulatory and compliance obligations that governed every interaction.

My Role

I led a cross-functional team of seven, spanning UX research, product design, and content, as Lead Product Design Director. I set the overall UX strategy, managed the design relationship with L&G's in-house experience team, and made sure every decision held up against both user needs and financial regulation. I was the senior design voice in all stakeholder sessions, from discovery through to delivery.

The Core Challenge

The hardest part of this project wasn't the complexity of the interface. It was designing within the constraints of financial regulation without letting compliance become an excuse for a poor experience, which it very often does on projects like this.

Every design decision had to be stress-tested against FCA guidelines, accessibility standards, and L&G's internal governance. Early on, several promising interaction patterns had to be rethought entirely when they conflicted with how contribution data could legally be presented. Rather than treating compliance as a blocker, we used it as a design constraint. It forced us to be clearer, more deliberate, and ultimately more trustworthy in the interface we built. That reframe matters, not just as a mindset, but because it produces noticeably different work.

The Decisions That Mattered

We rebuilt the error model from scratch. The original system surfaced validation errors late, after file upload, leaving administrators with no clear path to resolution. We redesigned the entire validation flow to catch issues progressively, giving users specific, actionable feedback at each step rather than a wall of failures at the end. This alone accounted for a significant reduction in processing time and support contacts.

We resisted designing for an average user that didn't exist. Our research revealed a significant gap between small business owners managing their own schemes and experienced corporate HR and finance teams. These aren't just different levels of sophistication; they have different mental models, different tolerance for complexity, and different ideas of what "clear" looks like. Rather than finding a compromise that worked adequately for neither, we developed adaptive flows that met each group where they were, without splitting the product in two.

We invested in alignment early rather than revisiting decisions constantly. L&G had strong in-house opinions about the platform's direction. A significant part of my role was building enough trust and shared language with their experience team that we could make decisions and move on, rather than relitigating the same questions in every review. Introducing shared design principles early gave us a filter that made subsequent decisions faster and less contested.

Outcome

The redesigned platform launched to tens of thousands of pension scheme members. Contribution file processing reduced from hours to minutes. The new system achieved full accessibility compliance, a first for this platform, and L&G's internal team adopted it as the benchmark for future product work within the division. For a platform that had previously been treated as infrastructure, ending up as the internal standard for product quality was a result nobody had quite anticipated at the start.