First Swipe
Experience

When a customer is approved for a Chase co-brand credit card, there's a critical window — Day 0 — where excitement is highest but the physical card hasn't arrived. Most issuers leave this moment empty: a generic confirmation screen, then silence until the card shows up days later. This is a missed opportunity to drive engagement, digital adoption, and early card usage.

Chase's co-brand portfolio includes partners like Marriott Bonvoy, United Airlines, Southwest, IHG, British Airways, Disney, Amazon, DoorDash, Instacart, Hyatt, and more. Each partner has unique benefits, value propositions, and brand identities — but the post-approval experience was generic across all of them. Customers didn't understand their card's benefits, weren't provisioning their digital wallet, and were calling in with basic questions.

The mandate was clear: design a warm welcome onboarding flow that could scale across 12+ co-brand partners while feeling uniquely tailored to each brand — reinforcing the card's value proposition, driving immediate digital wallet provisioning, and reducing early-tenure servicing calls.

The design strategy centered on three pillars — each addressing a specific business and customer need while remaining flexible enough to adapt across partner brands.

The template system works because brand adaptation happens at the token level, not the component level. Each partner gets a scoped token set — their primary color, their logo treatment, their benefit copy — that overrides the base Chase tokens without requiring any component to be rebuilt. That's what makes it possible to launch a new partner in days rather than weeks.

Each co-brand partner — Marriott, United, Southwest, IHG, Disney, Amazon — has its own brand guidelines, color palette, imagery requirements, and value propositions. But Chase needs a maintainable, consistent system that engineering can implement without bespoke builds for each partner. The tension between brand fidelity and system scalability was the core design challenge.

I designed a modular warm welcome template system — a shared structural framework (screen sequence, interaction patterns, CTA placements) with partner-specific content slots (hero imagery, brand colors, benefit copy, reward-specific CTAs). This let us launch United and Marriott first as proof-of-concept, then scale rapidly to additional partners.

After delivering United Airlines and Marriott Bonvoy, the system is now rolling out across the remaining co-brand portfolio through 2026 — British Airways, Iberia, Aer Lingus, Southwest (6 cards), IHG (3 cards), Hyatt (2 cards), DoorDash, Air Canada, Instacart, Disney (3 cards), and Amazon (2 cards). Each launch follows the same template framework, reducing design-to-development handoff time significantly.

Each partner engagement starts with a structured kickoff — aligning on brand guidelines, benefit hierarchy, key value propositions, and any partner-specific requirements. I led the design side of these kickoffs, presenting the template framework and adapting it to each partner's needs. For example, our Instacart kickoff involved a series of Figma-based presentation slides walking through the template system, brand integration points, and screen-by-screen content mapping.

The modular template approach meant engineering could implement new partners largely through configuration — swapping content, colors, and imagery rather than rebuilding screens. This reduced the typical partner launch timeline and allowed parallel workstreams across multiple partner launches.

United launch data showed the digital wallet CTA performed significantly better on screen two than screen one — users who saw the card art first were more likely to provision. We moved the wallet CTA forward in the Marriott flow based on that signal, and saw provisioning lift carry over. Each partner's metrics feed back into the template.

Key screens from the warm welcome flow, shown as generalized mockups. Each screen adapts to partner-specific branding, benefits, and value propositions.

The shipped system proved the model. These are forward-looking concepts I explored to push the warm welcome further — none are shipped, all are grounded in real signals from the initial launch data.