SUNBOUND · B2B PAYMENTS · 2024–2025

Reimagining payments so operators stop calling support.

Sunbound simplifies payments for senior living communities. Residents could already pay electronically, but operators still leaned on Customer Success for basic payment flows. I designed the self-serve experience that let them collect from residents and caregivers on their own.

Role: Lead product designer
Partners: Product, engineering, customer success
Research: 6 interviews with business office managers
Timeline: Sunbound, 2024–2025
Outcome: $80M+ in payments over 12 months

The person who pays is rarely the resident

Discovery began with 6 deep-dive interviews with business office managers, the community staff who run billing, and the payers they work with, who are often adult children or caregivers.

Operators handled payments manually and often struggled just to find the right person to pay. That delayed cash flow and pulled time from both operators and support.

“It’s rarely the resident who pays – it’s their daughter in Chicago or son in Phoenix.”
— Community operator

Affinity mapping distilled three needs: clarity on payment status and history, flexible ways to collect, and the ability to delegate payment without calling support.

Mapping the whole journey

With product, engineering and customer success, I mapped the journey end to end, from an operator spotting an outstanding balance to a caregiver paying from another state. Three principles came out of it:

Minimize clicks for time-strapped business office managers
Make responsibilities obvious between operator, resident and caregiver
Build trust through transparency with real-time status

Send to Pay

The interaction I pushed hardest for: operators send a personalized payment link straight to the designated payer. It answered the operator’s real problem, finding and reaching the person who pays, and it became the keystone of the prototype. It drew immediate praise in feedback sessions.

Bringing it to life

The clickable prototype paired a resident-facing payment page, clear, mobile-friendly and secure, with a payment activity drilldown for operators. In usability testing, operators valued the control and visibility; caregivers found the payment flow intuitive.

Results

$80M+
in payments over 12 months through the payments product
Self-serve
payment collection without Customer Success
Faster
payment cycles for communities

What I took from it

Design for who actually acts, not who the system assumes. The account belonged to the resident, but the payment came from someone else entirely. Send to Pay worked because it followed the real relationship.