Source of Wealth

Problem

Source of Wealth is a fundamental compliance question with an unusually difficult UX problem behind it: How do you explain how a person's crypto wealth accumulated over time in a way that a non-specialist can understand and a compliance professional can defend?

Traditional Source of Wealth and Source of Funds checks are established parts of KYC and AML processes. Source of Funds focuses on the origin of money used for a particular transaction; Source of Wealth addresses the broader origin of the person's accumulated wealth. For financial institutions, both contribute to understanding a customer's financial and risk profile and investigating suspicious activity.

Crypto makes this substantially harder.

Wealth can develop through a mixture of fiat funding, spot trading, derivatives, capital appreciation, mining, staking, airdrops, transfers from external parties, and activity spread across exchanges and wallets. An investigator does not simply need a balance. They need to reconstruct a plausible economic story.

The documented primary user problem was therefore straightforward but broad: investigators in banks, financial services, and law enforcement needed to understand a crypto asset holder's Source of Wealth over time so they could determine whether funds came from legitimate sources, verify whether the client's story checked out, and investigate suspicious activity further.

Research also showed that different investigative personas wanted different levels of fidelity. Compliance teams could potentially work with simplified top-level summaries and tolerate some estimation; tax investigators were more concerned with annual periods and accounting treatment; investigators frequently preferred spreadsheet outputs because they allowed sorting, filtering, aggregation, and independent analysis.

That created a central product tension: how much complexity could we remove before the story stopped being credible?

The two stakeholder quotes below are representative composites synthesized from documented research themes rather than verbatim interview quotations.

'I don't want to reverse-engineer twenty wallets just to understand the client's story. Show me how the wealth was built, where the important changes happened, and where the explanation does not add up.'

COMPLIANCE INVESTIGATOR

Needs an understandable wealth narrative that connects transaction evidence with a defensible plausibility assessment.

'A polished chart is useful, but I still need the underlying data. If something looks unusual, I want to filter it, reconcile it, and investigate it myself.'

FINANCIAL-CRIME / TAX INVESTIGATOR

Needs a high-level interpretation for orientation while retaining access to detailed evidence and exportable data for independent analysis.

Proposal & Process

The proposal was to move Source of Wealth away from being a raw collection of transactions and toward a layered reconstruction of the customer's economic story.

At the top level, the product should explain how wealth was accumulated and identify the most important contributors. Underneath that narrative, investigators should still have access to structured transaction and counterparty data when deeper analysis was necessary.

The documented delivery strategy was intentionally incremental: validate what customers actually needed, ship the lowest-cost useful implementation using existing infrastructure, be explicit about uncertainty, and then deepen the product once evidence justified the investment.

The UX/UI process followed seven sequential steps:

1. Define the compliance job and disambiguate the domain.

   We first clarified Source of Funds versus Source of Wealth and mapped the core user outcome: reconstruct where wealth came from, determine whether it is legitimate and plausible, and support additional investigation when the story does not reconcile.

2. Map the potential wealth-generation mechanisms.

   Discovery catalogued the channels that could contribute to a crypto wealth story—including external inflows, capital appreciation, derivatives, spot trading, mining, staking, and airdrops. This provided the conceptual model from which the interface and reporting structure could be designed.

3. Segment requirements by investigative persona.

   Research distinguished the needs of bank compliance professionals, crime investigators, and tax investigators instead of assuming a single universal workflow. The team explicitly tested assumptions around accuracy tolerance, annual reporting, P&L expectations, wallet-level detail, and preference for spreadsheets versus visual summaries.

4. Use interviews and surveys to search for the minimum viable answer.

   Rather than asking users which features they wanted, the research focused on finding the lowest-cost deliverable that would still satisfy the compliance requirement. Interviews examined what level of Source of Wealth reconstruction users would accept and which details were essential before the product became credible.

5. Design a layered reporting model.

   The experience combined a high-level Source of Wealth view with supporting evidence. The first delivery included report/index restructuring, a complete transaction and counterparty CSV, fiat Source of Funds breakdowns, crypto Source of Funds buckets, and visual Source of Wealth graphs. This preserved the ability to move from narrative to evidence rather than forcing every persona into the same visualization.

6. Make uncertainty visible.

   A major product risk was that a visually confident report could overstate what Cense actually knew. The implementation approach therefore emphasized transparency about what was unknown, unscreened, estimated, or inferred. UX language and data presentation had to communicate evidentiary quality rather than treating every calculated number as equally certain.

7. Iterate toward a richer chronological wealth story.

   The initial version intentionally established the foundation first. Subsequent product direction expanded toward appreciation stories, trading stories, period-based reconstruction, holdings at the reporting date, profitability context, and a narrative users could repeat and defend internally. The current product framing describes Source of Wealth as helping first-line users understand the story simply while giving second-line users enough structure for a defensible plausibility assessment.

Throughout the work, Design operated between Business, compliance domain experts, customer research, and Engineering. The goal was not to design a static report in isolation but to negotiate the boundary between regulatory expectations, available data, computational feasibility, and what a human investigator could reasonably understand.

Result

The project established a layered Source of Wealth experience that moved Cense beyond showing individual blockchain transactions and toward reconstructing how wealth was accumulated.

Core deliverables included:

• A Source of Wealth overview

  presenting the customer's wealth story at a level appropriate for initial compliance review.

• Fiat Source of Funds breakdowns

  to identify how traditional-currency funding entered the crypto ecosystem.

• Crypto wealth-generation buckets

  , including categories such as appreciation, mining, trading, and other identifiable sources.

• Source of Wealth visualizations

  that made accumulation patterns and major contributors easier to interpret.

• A comprehensive transaction and counterparty CSV

  , preserving the detailed, filterable evidence required by investigators who preferred spreadsheet workflows.

• A redesigned report/index structure

  so the Source of Wealth narrative could be understood in context rather than appearing as an isolated metric.

• Explicit evidence-quality communication

  identifying data that was unknown, unscreened, estimated, or inferred.

• A roadmap toward appreciation, trading, and annual wealth stories

  , allowing the initial implementation to evolve toward more sophisticated period-based reconstruction rather than delaying delivery until every edge case was solved.

The later product framing further crystallized this work into a simple value proposition: Cense should help banks understand not only what a client owns, but how they got there. The intended experience gives first-line teams a readable explanation of the client's wealth journey while preserving enough structure for second-line teams to test its plausibility.

This directly addressed the initial friction. Users no longer had to construct the entire economic narrative manually from individual wallets and transactions, while investigators who needed deeper analysis were not forced to abandon their spreadsheet-based workflows.

Impact

• Converted blockchain activity into a human-readable compliance narrative:

  The product established a structured way to explain how wealth accumulated rather than leaving investigators to infer the story from raw transaction history.

• Supported both first-line comprehension and deeper investigation:

  High-level summaries reduced the orientation burden while transaction and counterparty exports preserved the analytical freedom required by specialist investigators.

• Addressed a core customer expectation:

  Internal product research identified Source of Wealth capability as a basic requirement repeatedly raised by prospective customers and therefore an important product capability for commercial adoption.

• Created a scalable foundation for richer economic-profile reconstruction:

  The initial Source of Wealth implementation established data categories, report structure, evidence semantics, and user expectations that could later support appreciation narratives, trading narratives, annual reports, and broader economic-profile reconstruction.

Challenges

• Reconciling different definitions of 'enough evidence.'

  Compliance professionals, tax investigators, and crime investigators did not require the same degree of precision or the same reporting intervals. Instead of treating those conflicts as UI preferences, we separated persona needs and investigated which level of fidelity was actually required for each workflow.

• Working around legacy technical constraints and edge cases.

  The PRD explicitly identified legacy code and transaction-model limitations as feasibility risks, including cases where multiple counterparties could create additional technical debt. The mitigation was an incremental delivery strategy: use existing implementation paths where possible, constrain the first scope, and reserve deeper refactoring for cases where the product value justified it.

• Communicating estimates without creating false confidence.

  A Source of Wealth report can look authoritative even when portions are inferred. We treated evidentiary transparency as part of the interaction design and deliberately exposed unknown, unscreened, and estimated information instead of presenting every output as a hard fact.

Role

Senior UX / Product Design Consultant

• Translated specialist AML, KYC, blockchain, accounting, and investigative requirements into understandable product concepts and report structures.
• Designed the information hierarchy connecting the high-level wealth narrative to underlying transaction evidence.
• Worked with Product and Engineering to constrain the first implementation around technically feasible, high-value workflows rather than attempting to solve every Source of Wealth edge case simultaneously.
• Advocated for explicit evidence and uncertainty states so visual polish could not be mistaken for data certainty.

User Experience Researcher / Discovery Lead

• Structured discovery around high-risk assumptions, including acceptable accuracy, required P&L detail, wallet-level versus customer-level analysis, annual reporting, and spreadsheet-versus-visualization preferences.
• Helped plan surveys and investigator interviews designed to identify the minimum viable compliance deliverable rather than collect superficial feature requests.
• Segmented research across compliance, financial-crime, and tax-oriented personas to expose differences hidden by the generic label 'investigator.'
• Converted research evidence into a phased product strategy: establish a credible Source of Wealth foundation first, then deepen the reconstruction into appreciation, trading, and period-based narratives as the value became clearer.

Learnings

• A financial narrative is more useful than a financial snapshot:

  Knowing the current value of a portfolio answers 'what does the customer have?' Source of Wealth requires answering the harder question—'how did they get there?' Designing for that distinction changed the product from a collection of metrics into a chronology users could reason about.

• Different levels of expertise require layers, not separate products:

  First-line compliance users benefit from a concise explanation, while specialist investigators often want the underlying rows. Progressive disclosure and exportable evidence allowed both needs to coexist without forcing every user through maximum complexity.

• Transparency can be a product feature:

  In high-stakes analytical tools, acknowledging what the system does not know increases trust. Explicitly differentiating hard evidence, estimates, inferred values, and unscreened data is not a disclaimer added after the design—it is a fundamental part of the UX.