Conversational AI · Financial Planning
Ryoma AI was designed to make financial planning more approachable by replacing traditional sales conversations with an AI-guided experience. Through natural conversations, users could learn about insurance, investments, and retirement planning, receive personalized recommendations, and build a personalized financial plan before connecting with a licensed advisor.
As Ryoma AI’s founding product designer, I partnered with executive leadership and engineering to transform an early-stage vision into a cohesive product ecosystem. I led product strategy, user experience, visual identity, and the design system while shaping the end-to-end customer journey, and established the company’s brand through its marketing website, investor presentations, and customer-facing experiences.
Ryoma AI wasn’t designed to replace financial advisors. It was designed to make them more effective. By building trust, improving financial literacy, and helping customers make informed decisions before connecting with a licensed advisor, the experience created value for both customers and advisors.
Designing for trust began with understanding the cultural context and financial expectations of Japanese consumers.
I researched the Japanese financial services market through customer interviews, competitive analysis, digital products, shopping behaviors, and local design conventions. I also created five personas representing different financial goals, digital literacy levels, and life stages.
These insights informed every design decision that followed, including the conversational experience, avatar system, information architecture, visual language, and marketing website. We also used the personas to evaluate the AI experience, role-playing each customer profile to see how well it adapted its explanations, recommendations, and conversational style to different users. Building trust meant designing for the expectations of Japanese consumers, not simply translating a Western product.
These insights shaped more than the conversational interface. They influenced how customers entered the experience, how trust was established across touchpoints, and how information flowed between customers, advisors, and financial institutions.
The conversational AI was only one part of the product. Customers could discover Ryoma through multiple channels, continue conversations across devices, and transition seamlessly to licensed financial advisors. Every interaction was connected into a single ecosystem that supported customers, advisors, and financial institutions alike.
Customers could begin their journey on any device while maintaining a single, continuous conversation. Whether they started on a desktop, mobile phone, interactive kiosk, or LINE, context and personalization followed them across every touchpoint.
Customers could begin on one device and continue on another without losing context.
The AI adjusted its explanations based on each person’s financial knowledge, confidence, and life situation.
Every conversation produced a structured summary, allowing advisors to begin with context instead of repeating introductory questions.
Every customer interaction was designed to be measurable. I created an analytics framework that connected customer behavior throughout the customer journey, giving advisors, managers, and product teams visibility into engagement, conversion, and journey performance.
Track QR scans by location, branch, campaign, and time.
Measure engagement, conversation completion, recommendations, and advisor handoffs.
Monitor qualified leads, conversion, and product adoption.
Use customer insights to improve recommendations, refine marketing strategies, and guide future product decisions.
As the founding designer, I also established Ryoma AI’s visual identity and created the customer-facing experiences that brought the platform to market.
The website served two primary audiences: Japanese financial institutions evaluating a partnership and global investors evaluating the company. I developed the information architecture, content strategy, and copy before designing the experience in Figma and building the production site with Claude. The site went from concept to launch-ready in under a week.
View Live WebsiteDesigned in Figma. Built with Claude.
To support a fast-moving startup, I created a reusable presentation system that enabled leadership to quickly build consistent investor, partner, and customer presentations. I designed two core decks, established reusable templates and components, and trained the Chairman and CEO to independently create and update presentations as the company evolved.
“I will never cease to be amazed at how you turn things into these amazing slides.”
Mathew Shea, CTO
A documented style guide — color, typography, shadows — plus a component library and layout templates. The system is what let non-designers produce on-brand decks without me in the room.
Underlying every surface was a single documented system — color, typography, iconography, and avatar guidelines — that scaled across the chat app, kiosk, digital signage, dashboard, marketing site, and presentation templates. Establishing that system early meant every new surface, whether I designed it or engineering built it from my specs, stayed visually and structurally consistent without constant one-off decisions.
Created a seamless experience from first interaction through advisor meeting.
Prepared customers while empowering advisors to focus on expert guidance.
Tracked the customer journey from first touchpoint through conversion.
Delivered recommendations tailored to each customer’s goals and circumstances.
Established the product vision, UX, brand identity, and design system.
Aligned executives, engineering, and design around one customer experience.
Built reusable foundations that scaled across every touchpoint.
Led strategy, UX, visual design, and launch across the entire ecosystem.