APIX · Monetary Authority of Singapore / AFIN · via aamzng
The world's first cross-border API marketplace.
Context
APIX is an initiative of the ASEAN Financial Innovation Network (AFIN) — the world's first cross-border, open-architecture platform with sandbox and API-marketplace capabilities, backed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the IFC, and the ASEAN Bankers Association. It lets banks and fintechs across markets discover, test, and integrate with each other. The first version was showcased at the Singapore FinTech Festival 2019.
The challenge
A first-of-its-kind platform at the regulator level, with no template to copy — and a stakeholder map most agencies would decline: a central bank, an industry body, a country's Chief FinTech Officer, a global consultancy, and multiple delivery partners each building a different piece of the product. Nearly everyone in the room came from banking and finance, not digital product — and all of it had to cohere into one platform for the people who'd actually use it.
What I did
Through my consultancy, aamzng, I pitched and won the engagement — on the strength of our platform, research, and fintech-and-banking design experience, and prior work with several of the companies already on the project. Then I led it. My team owned the design end to end: the design system, the platform's information architecture, content strategy, information design, the user flows, and the entire user journey — down to the UI that unified multiple separate products, each built by a different company, into a single, holistic platform. I negotiated delivery across the group and held it to one product direction.
How I led
The hardest part wasn't design; it was translation. The stakeholders were bankers and finance leaders, not people who'd shipped digital products — so much of the job was education and process-building: teaching a coalition how digital products actually get made and decided. And because the room held some of the most senior policy and industry leaders in the region, political preference sometimes pushed against what the UX evidence supported. Holding the line on sound product decisions without losing the room took careful, hands-on diplomacy. I ran it as a player-coach: close enough to the craft to defend the right call, senior enough to navigate the politics around it.
Outcome
APIX launched at the Singapore FinTech Festival 2019 — the world's first cross-border, open-architecture API marketplace for financial institutions, with the work of multiple companies unified into one coherent platform. It has since grown into lasting infrastructure for the region's financial-services sector.
What it proves
Strategic programme leadership at the regulator-and-industry level — winning the mandate, aligning a coalition of powerful stakeholders none of whom I had authority over, translating between the banking and digital-product worlds, and shipping a genuinely first-of-its-kind platform. Very few design or product leaders have operated at this altitude.