Sweep are the experts in financial automation for SMEs, empowering finance teams with smart technology. Sweep currently offer 3 products - Sweep Pay, Expenses and Accounts Payable. The combination of these three products allows users to run the time-consuming financials of their business seamlessly.

Sweep started out as a travel and expenses related business, offering customers a dashboard and mobile app where they used open banking to make expenses a better process. As the pandemic hit in 2020 and teams were no longer travelling, they had to pivot (very quickly!). This was when the idea of automation and smart technology for financial processes began, and changed the company vision completely.

I was hired as Design Lead shortly after the pivot in business model. I joined the team as the very first designer - Sweep had worked with a small agency prior to my hire on all things expenses, but there was a whole suite of new products to design once I was onboarded. I spent a lot of time at Sweep creating concepts, doing research and designing up the new products end-to-end. As well as designing the new products, I also managed a re-brand for Sweep so that everything that had been done previously was inline with the vision for the new products.

As part of my role I also had a huge job of getting the company to work in a more user-focused way, and have better processes in general. I ran workshops to understand company goals, the future roadmap and what our priorities should be. I presented the User Centred Design Process to the team, and got them onboard with working in a completely different way than what they had been previously. It was a huge shift in culture within the business, which before was ran by developers and marketing.

When I first joined the company, I ran several different discovery workshops with the entire team, to get an understanding into what the goals and vision were for Sweep, where they wanted to position themselves within the market, and also how they could realistically achieve this. From the sessions I got a really good understanding of what the expectations were, and the company as a whole seemed pretty aligned with this.

I began doing competitor analysis, reviews of their products/website, and speaking with customers to understand what the next steps would look like. After presenting all of this research to the wider team, we set a roadmap of what the next 12 months looked like, and what we needed to prioritise in order to achieve the goals we had set.

After the roadmap was set, I began working on two work-streams. I managed a rebrand of Sweep, working closely with a Visual Designer and Marketing to achieve this. All of the previous products were rebranded, and a new website was created to encompass the 'new' Sweep and everything that it offered. This made a huge impact in attracting new customers, as previously the website/product offering were two completely different things.

Along side the rebrand, a lot of my time was spent working closely with the developers and a product owner to design and build out all of the journeys for the new product offering. The new product is a fully automated dashboard which offered Accounts Payable, Bulk Payments and Expense/Invoice management. We ran demos with customers to understand their needs, and if our solution solves the specific needs that they have. It was very fast-paced and we iterated quickly with customer feedback to offer the best solution that we could, as efficiently as possible.