Unified
Portals

Aeropay’s product suite spans bank linking, pay-by-bank checkout, instant payouts, and AI risk prevention. As the suite expanded, the dashboards around it had grown separately: a merchant portal for clients, an admin portal for risk and fraud monitoring, and an internal portal for merchant management.

Each dashboard served a real need, but they were built at different times, for different users, without a shared foundation. By the time this initiative started, Aeropay needed a more unified way to support merchants, internal teams, and the systems that connected them.

No one had the full picture in one place.

The fragmentation showed up differently depending on the user. Merchants relied on Aeropay for performance reports. Solutions Engineers jumped between tools to configure widgets, billing, and submerchants. Internal teams used separate systems to monitor risk, manage merchants, and support clients. No one had everything they needed in one place, and Aeropay’s team was absorbing that cost every day.

There was also a deeper structural challenge. A separate initiative, Universal Merchant, was redefining how Aeropay models merchant relationships: Partner → Merchant → Submerchant → Terminal. That model did not exist in the current portals, but the new experience needed to be designed around it from day one, even before the underlying data was live.

This work needed to solve a few connected challenges:

• Unify three separate dashboard products: merchant portal, admin risk and fraud tools, and internal merchant management portal.
• Design a new merchant portal with native analytics, reporting, exports, hierarchy, and self-serve workflows.
• Replace the Metabase dependency so merchants could access performance data without waiting on Aeropay.
• Support both merchant-facing and internal-facing workflows within one dashboard system.
• Design around a new merchant hierarchy that could support everything from single-location merchants to multi-brand partners.

I started with helping redefine new personas across merchant, risk, operations, support, and technical roles to clarify what the unified portal needed to support.

We imagined a one dashboard system with a single login, for a portal that was merchant facing and internal facing. The new model uses a shared shell, shared navigation patterns, and role-based access to support different workflows inside one system. The goal was to make routing feel invisible, so each user could land in the right context with ease.

A separate initiative, Universal Merchant, was redefining Aeropay’s merchant hierarchy model. The navigation needed to support different levels of complexity without forcing every merchant into the same shape. A single-location merchant and a multi-brand partner should both feel like the system was designed for them.

This work is currently in IA and feature planning. The next phase focuses on the shared shell, login and access model, merchant portal content, internal management layer, and risk workflows.