Olea: Built to Flex for Fintech

OVERVIEW

I led end-to-end UX design for Olea, a trade finance platform jointly built by Standard Chartered and Linklogis that connects institutional investors with supply chain enterprises across Asia and beyond. Starting from a complete blank slate, no brand, no design language, no prior reference, we designed three distinct portals and 600+ screens under two-week milestone cycles. When Olea’s brand identity was confirmed mid-project, our system was flexible enough to ship a full light/dark mode variant without rebuilding from scratch.

CHALLENGE

Traditional trade finance is slow, opaque, and largely inaccessible to smaller enterprises. Processes that take weeks leave businesses without working capital when they need it most. Standard Chartered and Linklogis co-founded Olea to close this gap: connecting institutional capital with supply chain enterprises through a fully digital, blockchain-enabled platform, serving Asia’s manufacturing corridors first, with expansion plans into the Middle East and Africa.

The design challenge was compounded by the conditions we were working in:

• No brand, no reference point: When the project began, there was no logo, no colour palette, no visual direction. Every structural and aesthetic decision had to be justified from first principles.
• Three user types with fundamentally different needs: Institutional investors require dense, high-confidence data to evaluate opportunities at scale. Suppliers need guided, low-friction workflows where ambiguity risks abandonment. Internal operations teams needed secure tools to manage the connections between them. Each demanded a distinct experience built on a shared system.
• A mid-project brand shift: Months into delivery, Olea confirmed its brand identity and leadership wanted the product to reflect it, across portals already in active development.

For a platform backed by Standard Chartered’s institutional credibility and built to serve enterprise clients across 70+ global trade corridors, the product experience had to match the trust the brand was promising. A fragmented or unclear interface would have undermined that credibility at exactly the moment Olea was trying to establish it.

APPROACH

We chose a business-component-based system, because Olea’s core challenge was rapidly assembling a data-heavy product with distinct business logic across three portals. This approach encapsulated not just visual style but functional behaviour: dashboard modules, trade card patterns, approval flows, and components that carried business rules alongside their visual form.

• Portal-first scoping: The Investor and Supplier portals, the external face of Olea, were prioritized and led by me directly. The Internal portal, with significantly greater operational complexity, was scoped in parallel without blocking customer-facing delivery.
• Freedom before brand: With no visual reference, we designed toward institutional credibility, a light mode that communicated trust and professional precision. This gave stakeholders something concrete to evaluate before Olea’s brand existed, and established a credible default that worked independently of any future identity direction.
• Flexibility baked in from the start: Token and component structure were designed to absorb future brand updates. The goal was a general principle of building to flex, so the system could adapt to changes that couldn’t be anticipated.
• Stakeholder-led validation: Without dedicated research infrastructure, validation ran through 10+ user interviews and structured stakeholder sessions, providing a real signal while maintaining delivery pace.

Impact

• 600+ high-fidelity screens delivered across all three portals under two-week milestone cycles
• Light + dark mode shipped following mid-project brand confirmation, with no rebuilding required
• ~75% UI element coverage through the business-component design system, reducing design debt and enabling rapid scaling across portals
• ~80% design adoption in MVP, with core patterns and interactions retained through later product iterations
• Supported trade finance operations across 70+ global trade corridors
• Strong recognition from Standard Chartered and Linklogis leadership, specifically for delivering brand-aligned, production-ready experiences under zero-reference starting conditions