Andrew Ashton

With extensive experience designing and delivering financial and enterprise products. I've led distributed teams - including direct reports - through complex product work, helping designers grow while setting the creative direction for the team. My focus is on raising quality, building clear ways of working, and keeping design closely connected to product, engineering and business goals.

My approach is data-led and AI-centric. I use research, evidence and AI-powered exploration together to challenge assumptions, test directions faster and get to better decisions earlier, when they are easier and cheaper to act on. This helps me create product experiences that are clear, useful and commercially grounded, with the right balance of usability, consistency and design craft.

Head of Product Design at ION Group (2024-10 – Present)

• Set creative direction across FX, Equities and enterprise platforms, improving design quality, consistency and clarity.
• Defined design roadmaps, objectives and team priorities, aligning design work with product and business goals.
• Realigned Design System governance and adoption across the UK, Europe and India, improving consistency, scale and delivery speed.
• Led a distributed team of six designers across the UK, Europe and India, supporting growth through 1-2-1s, reviews and coaching.
• Strengthened design culture through critique, structured feedback, clearer decision-making and practical playbooks.
• Led key initiatives hands-on, taking design from discovery and problem definition through to UX, UI, prototyping and delivery.
• Directed the design of FX product projects, shaping requirements, challenging assumptions and creating practical solutions with product, engineering and senior stakeholders.
• Used data, insight and metrics to guide design decisions and strengthen stakeholder conversations.
• Introduced AI-enabled workflows to speed up research, briefing, ideation, documentation and design exploration.

Principal Designer at London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) (2023-05 – 2024-09)

• Led the design of Smart Alerts, delivering personalised real-time market alerts from LSEG Workspace into Microsoft Teams and Outlook.
• Designed an LLM-powered wealth management tool, taking the concept from discovery through to prototype, user validation and stakeholder buy-in.
• Defined the strategic journey for embedding LSEG analytics and AI into Microsoft Office products as a natural part of the user workflow.
• Used rapid prototyping and continuous testing across AI initiatives to validate direction and reduce delivery risk before build.
• Aligned cross-functional teams and Microsoft partners around a clear, user-first product vision for AI-led experiences.
• Partnered with Business stakeholders to shape requirements around technical constraints, business priorities and user needs.

Design Lead at Goldman Sachs (2018-01 – 2023-02)

• Led the end-to-end redesign, rebuilding core liquidity workflows and aligning regional requirements with Asia-based stakeholders.
• Shaped the design vision from concept to delivery, translating research into high-quality, buildable product experiences.
• Aligned user, business and technical needs to deliver a redesign that increased trader engagement and new user adoption.
• Helped consolidate trading activity back onto X-Trade, reducing reliance on competitor platforms and strengthening its role as traders' primary tool.
• Sole lead designer for the UK launch of Marcus by Goldman Sachs, designing end-to-end flows for Online Savings, Joint Savings and ISA.
• Partnered with the US Marcus team to localise the product for UK customers, regulation and market needs.
• Worked hands-on with developers to align technical build with the intended user experience.
• Shaped creative direction for the launch campaign, using London imagery to bring the Marcus brand to life.
• Presented concepts to the Marcus Managing Director and senior marketing leaders, influencing launch decisions.
• Collaborated across leadership, technology and marketing to maintain alignment throughout the launch.
• Developed and refined onboarding experiences, driving a 95.2% success rate for new users — a critical metric for adoption of Goldman's first consumer product.
• Helped define shared design principles for Goldman Sachs' first company-wide design system.
• Established a scalable design and interaction approach across the firm's financial products.
• Built reusable guidelines and patterns, improving consistency and reducing duplicated design effort.
• Created flexible Figma component libraries and documentation to support smoother design-to-dev handoff.
• Supported design system adoption across product teams, helping designers and engineers work from a single source of truth.

Visual Design Lead at HSBC (2017-05 – 2018-01)

• Interviewed Sales Traders across Asia to uncover workflow pain points, translating findings into tested flows and prototypes.
• Diagnosed platform fragmentation and designed a solution that addressed core usability gaps rather than adding more fixes.

Visual Design Lead at Deutsche Bank / HCL (2014-09 – 2017-03)

Visual Design Lead at Money Advise Service (2014-03 – 2014-08)

Creative Lead at AIMIA (2013-04 – 2014-02)

Visual Design Lead at Vodafone (2011-08 – 2013-03)

Senior Designer at Nokia (2008-08 – 2011-03)

BA Hons in Graphic Design and Communication – Coventry University (1996-09 – 1999-09)