ORIGIN MARKETS
Automating Bond Issuance
Origin Markets is transforming the world of bond issuance with innovative digital tools that streamline the complex process of pricing, issuing, and managing debt. Think of it as a platform that takes a traditionally slow, manual process—full of spreadsheets and endless emails and turns it into a fast, seamless digital experience. By simplifying this process, Origin Markets is helping financial professionals work smarter and faster, ultimately opening up more opportunities for businesses and investors around the world.
A Quick Disclaimer:
Due to confidentiality agreements regarding the tools I worked on at Origin Markets, I am unable to share specific design elements or screenshots. However, I’m excited to share the process and impact of my contributions as the Lead Designer at Origin. The tools I worked on play a crucial role in bond pricing and issuance, helping professionals manage millions in assets.
Role
Design Lead
Discovery & ideation, end-to end design, restructuring information hierarchy, user-testing
Products
New Issue Pricer
Documentation
Platform
Desktop
The Manual Bond Issuance:
A Complex, Time-Consuming Endeavour
The process of bond issuance and pricing is traditionally an extensive and complex operation that often spans days or even weeks, especially when dealing with large-scale transactions in the millions to billions of dollars. The process involves multiple stakeholders, significant documentation, and a meticulous manual effort to ensure accuracy, compliance, and coordination. It’s some serious stuff that can’t be messed about.
MANUAL WORKFLOW BREAKDOWN
Data Gathering and Pricing Calculations: Investment banks and Debt Capital Markets (DCMs) teams manually collect and analyse market data to determine the bond's price and yield. This involves running calculations, filling out Excel sheets, and checking against various benchmarks. (Btw, Excel sheets is the main tool for documenting calculations and doing comparisons traditionally)
Communication Between Teams: Numerous email exchanges occur between Issuers, Legal teams, Investment Banks, and Syndicates. Each email exchange might contain critical data, feedback, or document revisions, leading to delays and an increased risk of errors. (Imagine a long thread of back-to-back emails…)
Document Drafting and Review: The Legal team manually drafts documents, termsheets, and bond contracts. This process is incredibly painstaking and often requires multiple rounds of revisions to ensure accuracy and regulatory compliance.
Manual Updates: As market conditions evolve, pricing and terms need to be adjusted manually, requiring further coordination and updates to documents, leading to a slower process and a higher chance of errors.
Transforming the
New Issue Pricer
A platform that centralises all bond pricing requests into a single platform, allowing Debt Capital Markets (DCM) and Syndicate teams to collaborate seamlessly. By automating the pricing process, it speeds up bond issuances, reduces manual errors, and ensures more accurate pricing decisions making the entire workflow faster and more efficient.
Current pricing workflow is full of friction
Inconsistent
Multiple emails in varying formats make tracking and organizing pricing hard
KEY PAIN POINTS
Manual
Calculating swaps, updating comps, and maintaining spreadsheets eats up time and is prone to errors
Disconnected
DCM and Syndicate teams lack a centralised collaboration platform for pricing requests
💡 By pinpointing the friction in the manual pricing workflow, we establish the core objectives of the New Issue Pricer ensuring that, as we explore and build its features, we never reintroduce the same pain points.
Goal
Increase adoption of the automated pricing workflow
How?
Seamless collaboration between DCM’s and Syndicates
Reduce the manual work significantly
(i.e. email chases for reviews and approvals, manual calculations, copying and pasting across multiple workbooks, stress over version controls, and more)
Support team-specific workflows
My Role
The New Issue Pricer’s Beta launched on the strength of initial user interviews, in-house expertise, and team members’ prior DCM experience but it still harboured untested assumptions and critical architectural gaps. Recognising the need for a solid foundation, I spearheaded a comprehensive overhaul to future-proof its information architecture and design system. Within three months of joining Origin Markets, I became the Lead Designer, leading the NIP revamp (i.e. MVP) and shaping the design vision across other Origin products.
Beyond hands-on design work:
Streamlined workflows to improve design management, development handoffs, and team collaboration, which boosted efficiency and sped up project delivery.
Expanded the design team by recruiting top talent and mentoring junior colleagues to handle critical tasks amid resource constraints.
Transitioned to a scalable design system by establishing robust standards that evolve with the company’s growing needs.
Since attending every client meeting wasn’t always feasible, I led user-interview workshops for the business development team, product managers, and engineers—teaching the do’s and don’ts of interviewing to ensure accurate, useful, and unbiased client feedback made its way to the design team.
Decluttering Workflow
The original workflow was messy, with numerous loopholes, no differentiation of roles between teams, and no clear permissions on what users could and couldn’t do. One of the first things we did was to map out the end-to-end user journey, working closely with different stakeholders to ensure that each party’s needs were addressed. We also worked on setting user permissions and validated the new structure with in-house experts and existing clients who were excited to collaborate and provide feedback. This restructuring created a clearer, more efficient workflow.
Improved Information Hierarchy
I scrapped the original design and rebuilt the information hierarchy from the ground up, laying a flexible, scalable foundation that let us phase in new features after MVP. Think of it like renovating room by room: we would fix one area, then move on, always keeping the big-picture layout in mind so every tweak fit into a cohesive whole.
At the same time, I oversaw other Origin products, so we reused as many components as possible. When a component fell short, we refined it so our library served every tool in the suite unless of course it was necessary to create something very custom to accommodate to a specific need.
Since I can’t show you NIP’s screens, imagine Excel on steroids: dozens of data-rich tables, each packed with functions and tailored to DCM or Syndicate workflows. Getting the hierarchy right was crucial, with every cell, filter, and button placed exactly where users expect it without overwhelming them. It’s like a Bloomberg terminal or an advanced crypto exchange: chaotic at first glance but each module has a clear purpose and drives smarter, faster decisions.
Notable Features I Designed for New Issue Pricer
Review & Share Collaboration
Review interface that lets DCM and Syndicate team members (and desks) iterate, share rationale and complete pricing requests in real time eliminating email chains and ensuring all stakeholders stay aligned. Clear user journeys for “Request Review” and “Complete Pricing”.
Role-Based Permission Controls
A clear interface that grants users specific capabilities whether they can create pricing requests, edit, mark a pricing complete or simply be able to view only - ensuring everyone only sees and does what their role allows.
Notifications
Automated alerts (in-app and emails) triggered by key actions like new pricing requests, request reviews/updates, or completed pricing woven into the end-to-end NIP workflow to keep necessary users informed and aligned at every stage.
Historical Pricing
Once a pricing is “rubber-stamped,” it’s locked down. Role-based permissions govern who can view historical pricings, who can edit or override them ensuring auditability and reducing accidental changes.Dedicated NIP Inbox
Lists pricing requests assigned to you and your desk, complete with status stages, priority indicators, due dates, and quick-access links to historical pricings. It also supports duplicating a completed pricing with the same details and components to create a new pricing request without the need to create a pricing request from scratch.
Guided Data Entry Interface
Contextual cues highlight exactly which cells need and don’t need input and it’s clear which cells have been assigned to you, your desk or teammate. Users wouldn’t need to wonder “what’s next?” or “did I miss something?”.
OUTCOME
Since the launch of the MVP, it opened up the company to more users within existing clients and attracted a wider range of new clients.
Reflection
Steep Learning Curve
One of the most challenging aspects of the NIP project was the steep learning curve. Coming from a non-financial background, it was difficult at first to understand the complex processes of bond issuance and pricing. However, by engaging directly with users and working closely with the team, I was able to overcome this challenge and design more effectively.
Simplicity in Design
The second challenge was designing for simplicity. It may sound cliché, but simplifying a complex product is incredibly difficult. The design rules I had learned didn’t always apply to our users' needs. Sometimes, what seemed cluttered or complicated to me was actually effective for them. I had to break certain design conventions to better serve the unique requirements of bond pricing and issuance professionals.