JPMorgan Chase · Credit Cards
First Swipe
Experience
A series of post-approval onboarding screens that introduce new Chase co-brand cardholders to their card's benefits, drive digital wallet provisioning, and reduce early-tenure calls — now scaling across 12+ co-brand partners.
Impact
Leading with results
The Day 0 experience contributed to a measurable lift in account activation and digital wallet adoption across partner programs. EMOB customers averaged roughly 40,000 fewer calls per month in 2025 compared to the prior two years, and the 2025 YTD call rate dropped from 18.1% (2024) to 15.9% — with November 2025 reaching 12.4%, the lowest on record.
The Opportunity
The first impression after "You're approved"
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.
Design Approach
A scalable system, not a one-off flow
The design strategy centered on three pillars — each addressing a specific business and customer need while remaining flexible enough to adapt across partner brands.
Reinforce the Value Proposition
Each partner's warm welcome leads with the specific benefits that make their card worth having — Marriott points, United miles, Southwest companion pass. Not generic "welcome to Chase" messaging, but partner-specific value reinforcement.
Drive Digital Wallet Provisioning
Before the physical card arrives, get the card into Apple Pay / Google Pay immediately. This turns Day 0 from a dead zone into the start of the spending relationship. The flow makes provisioning feel like a natural next step, not an upsell.
Reduce Early-Tenure Calls
Introduce key self-service capabilities — alerts, autopay, paperless statements — within the welcome flow itself. By surfacing these features at the moment of highest engagement, customers learn to manage their account in-app instead of calling.
Scaling Design
One system, twelve brands
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.
Process
From kickoff to launch
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.
Post-launch metrics for United and Marriott informed refinements to the template — adjusting CTA placement, benefit ordering, and provisioning flow positioning based on what drove the strongest engagement and conversion signals. Each iteration made the template stronger for the next partner.
Delivered Work
The warm welcome experience
Key screens from the warm welcome flow, shown as generalized mockups. Each screen adapts to partner-specific branding, benefits, and value propositions.
Vision & concept exploration
What comes next
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.
The C-series uses a richer, more cinematic visual language than the shipped 01–04 flow — intentional, to signal that these are exploratory ideas rather than production specs.
Immersive dark welcome
A full-bleed card reveal with metallic sheen animation, the customer's name, and a guided onboarding checklist — inspired by the Apple Card activation moment.
Preference-driven setup
Asking "what matters most?" lets us surface relevant benefits first — a Travel-oriented user sees lounge access and transfer partners before dining credits.
Physics-based card drop
Spring-physics animation with rotation and bounce makes the Apple Wallet provisioning step feel tactile and rewarding instead of transactional.
First purchase confetti
Celebrating the first transaction with points earned, bonus progress, and a milestone unlock turns a routine event into a moment of delight that reinforces card usage.
Live rewards dashboard
Category-level points breakdown, travel value conversion, and welcome bonus progress — making the value of every swipe tangible and visible.
CMS-driven benefit slots
A content layer where partner teams configure benefit rows, hero imagery, and CTA copy without engineering — enabling rapid co-brand launches at scale.
Vision State · What's Next
Personalization at onboarding
The shipped warm welcome treats every Marriott cardholder, every United cardholder, identically within their partner. We've already proven that even crude template personalization moves the numbers — the next layer is to make the welcome itself adaptive: surface the right benefit, in the right order, for each cardholder, in the moment they're most likely to act.
Rank benefits by predicted use
A model trained on first-90-day cardholder behavior, partner enrollment signals, and acquisition channel reorders the partner's benefit catalog — foregrounding the one each cardholder is most likely to actually use.
Plain-language reason copy
An LLM generates a one-line "personalized for you because…" line under each benefit, grounded in the cardholder's own pre-approval signals. Not generic copy — specific, legible, defensible.
Thumbs-down to refine
Cardholders dismiss recommendations with a single tap. The signal trains the model for similar profiles. Low-confidence cases fall back to today's static partner-default flow with no UI change.
Same chrome as today's shipped warm welcome — predictability matters for trust. The personalization pill at the top sets expectations explicitly.
High-match benefit gets the spotlight (Chase blue border, larger card). Lower-match benefits stack below with smaller treatment. Match score visible so the cardholder can judge whether to trust it.
LLM-generated one-liner grounded in the cardholder's actual pre-approval signal. The reason is concrete and testable, not generic ("you might enjoy this benefit").
Cardholders who don't recognize themselves in the recommendations can override with a values picker (Travel / Dining / Family / Cash back). Failure state: low-confidence model output drops to today's static partner default with no change.
Picker appears in-flow, not in Settings → Preferences → AI. Cardholder corrects the model in the same screen they encountered the wrong recommendation.
"Use suggested order" is the same visual prominence as the CTA, not a smaller text link. Cardholders shouldn't feel pressured to participate.
Override boosts feature importance temporarily. After 30 days the model reverts to behavior-only signals, which by then are richer and more reliable than the cardholder's stated preference.
No "PERSONALIZED FOR YOU" pill. No match scores. No rationale chips. Cardholders below the model's confidence threshold see exactly what they'd see in 2025. The system's failure mode is the previous system's success mode.
Benefits appear in the partner's pre-defined catalog order — same content, same CTA. Predictability matters most when the model isn't confident; degrading gracefully means showing a known-good baseline, not a half-broken AI.
- Spotify "Made For You" hub — the "Recommended because you listened to X" label pattern makes recommendation logic legible without overwhelming the surface; mirror it in financial-services language.
- Robinhood's investor-profile onboarding — sets a precedent for fintech apps capturing user preferences as a low-pressure first-run gesture, exactly what the "Tell us what matters" picker does.
- Apple Wallet's transaction insights — shows a clean, trustworthy way to display "we noticed this pattern" insights without feeling intrusive in a financial context.
Impact
Measuring what matters
Engagement
Operational Efficiency
My Contributions
What I worked on
Template System Design
Designed the modular warm welcome template — a shared structural framework with partner-specific content slots that scales across 12+ co-brand partners without bespoke builds.
Partner Experience Design
Led the design for United Airlines and Marriott Bonvoy warm welcomes — adapting the template to each partner's brand, benefits, and value proposition while maintaining system consistency.
Digital Provisioning Strategy
Designed the Day 0 digital wallet provisioning flow — positioning the CTA for maximum conversion while keeping it integrated into the welcome experience, not a separate upsell.
Call Reduction Design
Integrated key self-service features (alerts, autopay, paperless) directly into the warm welcome flow — proactively addressing the questions that were driving early-tenure call volume.
Partner Kickoff & Collaboration
Led design kickoffs with each co-brand partner — presenting the template framework, aligning on brand requirements, and translating partner feedback into design specifications.
- Designed onboarding system scaling across 12+ co-brand partners
- Delivered United Airlines and Marriott Bonvoy warm welcome experiences
- Led partner kickoff presentations for brand alignment
- Collaborated with product, engineering, marketing, and partner relations
- Contributed to a 29% lift in digital wallet provisioning and a measurable drop in EMOB call volume
Key Learnings