Elevate
Channel Partner Portal for one of India's largest wealth distribution networks — the distributor platform, admin tooling, and document layer that replaced years of email chains and Excel exports for AIF fund distribution.
India's AIF distribution still ran on email threads and Excel sheets.
360 ONE Asset manages one of India's largest Alternative Investment Fund businesses, distributed through a network of wealth partners across the country. The distribution pipeline — onboarding, drawdowns, earnings, client statements, AMC announcements — lived in inboxes and spreadsheets.
Distributors were the face of the product in front of UHNI and family office clients, but the platform behind them was invisible. Every client question became a manual lookup. Every AMC event became a forwarded email. Every new distributor joined via a trail of PDFs and reconciliation calls.
Distributors couldn't answer their clients. Admins couldn't support their distributors.
We ran discovery from May 2025 across two user groups — the distributors in the field and the AIF operations admins managing them from HQ. Direct distributor access was limited, so we went deep with domain experts on the AMC team and ran internal observation sessions to pressure-test every assumption.
The same friction kept surfacing:
- No real-time visibility into client earnings, AUM, or fund-level performance — distributors couldn't respond to client calls in the moment.
- Drawdown letters and capital call notices moved through email, got lost, and needed chasing every cycle.
- Admin teams were spending entire days on manual tasks instead of analysing and supporting top distributors.
- Onboarding and KYC for new partners was scattered across tools — no audit trail, no status, no self-service.
The goal reframed itself: turn the distributor's inbox into an application, and give admins a cockpit instead of a to-do list.
Two surfaces, one source of truth.
Rather than ship one monolithic portal, we split the work into two tightly-linked surfaces that shared the same backbone — a Distributor Platform for the field, and an Admin Platform for operations. Both consumed the same document layer, the same performance data, and the same notification spine.
Business teams showed up with Excel wireframes on June 3, 2025. We translated them into low-fidelity flows inside a week, walked them back through stakeholders, and iterated in days instead of sprint cycles. Rapid prototyping wasn't a luxury — it was how we kept scope honest against a domain we were still learning.
"If the distributor has to ask us the number, we've already lost. The portal is the answer, not the phone call."
The MVP deliberately narrowed to AIF — PMS and Mutual Fund parity were tempting, but they would have delayed the one thing distributors needed yesterday. We also parked an Agentic Chat layer and a cross-product switcher to later phases once the data architecture caught up with the ambition.
A distributor's day, structured.
The distributor dashboard was built around the four questions a partner asks every morning: how am I doing, what do my clients need, what's coming, and what just happened? Each answer became a first-class surface.
- Performance KPIs — Total AUM, earnings, active clients, drawdowns — above the fold, no drilldown required.
- Actionable tasks and redemptions — the things that need the distributor's attention today, sorted by urgency.
- Client-level statement access — portfolio, transactions, and documents scoped per client, no export step.
- A Celebrations rail — client birthdays and anniversaries — so relationship work stays visible alongside the numbers.
- A product switcher frame — groundwork for PMS and MF layers when the backend is ready.
The quiet centrepiece.
Most of the friction in the old flow wasn't the UI — it was documents. Drawdown letters, capital calls, fund factsheets, statements, AMC circulars. All of them moved through email attachments with no version control, no audit trail, and no way to know who had received what.
We built a shared document layer that the Admin platform pushed into and the Distributor platform pulled from. Uploads, tagging, versioning, and distribution all happened in one place. Distributors stopped chasing PDFs. Admins stopped forwarding them.
Shipped on ONE Design System v2.
Elevate was one of the first surfaces to fully consume ONE Design System v2 — the internal design system I scaled across the firm's wealth product lines. Tokens, components, data visualisation primitives, and motion patterns all came from the system, which kept visual parity with our enterprise platforms and meant the handoff stayed quiet from first frame to final build.
A single window for the people who move the money.
This one was a duet.
Elevate was built alongside Jai Wadhwani — we partnered across discovery, wireframes, and the dashboard IA, trading screens back and forth until the mental model locked. Two designers in a shared file kept the feedback loop honest.
- Co-designer
- Jai Wadhwani →
- Extended write-up
- Distributors Portal on Medium →
The distributor is the product, not the audience.
The instinct on a B2B2C surface is to design for the admin team that commissioned the project. The real product is the distributor in the field — the person about to open a client call on their laptop, who doesn't get a second chance at the first number they say out loud. Everything we shipped got measured against that moment.
Rapid prototyping on a domain you don't yet own is how you buy trust. Days of concept → review → iterate beat weeks of polishing the wrong assumption. The parts we deferred — Agentic Chat, cross-product switcher — got deferred because we had the conviction to, not because we ran out of time.