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 almost no transparency into what was actually happening. For scheme members, the experience was confusing and disengaging, and it made 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, I'll be honest, is what usually happens 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
The error model needed a complete rethink. The original system surfaced validation errors late, after file upload, leaving administrators with no clear path to resolution. I pushed the team to redesign 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. That single change accounted for a significant reduction in processing time and support contacts.
One of the early calls I made was to stop designing for an average user that didn't exist. The research had 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 letting the team find a compromise that worked adequately for neither, I directed them toward adaptive flows that met each group where they were, without splitting the product in two.
The third decision was about how I managed the client relationship itself. L&G had strong in-house opinions about the platform's direction, and without a shared framework those opinions had a habit of reopening decisions that had already been made. I invested time early in building the trust and shared language needed to keep things moving, introducing design principles that became the agreed filter for every subsequent decision. It made reviews faster, and it meant the team could focus on the work rather than relitigating the same questions every fortnight.
Outcome
The redesigned platform launched to tens of thousands of pension scheme members. Contribution file processing came down 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.