Mike Kelly is a product design and UX strategy leader focused on emerging AI products, complex finance products and expert systems.

His current work centers on platform modernization and AI product origination: improving mature systems through clearer workflows and design foundations, while also helping shape new software products where the category, interaction model, and product logic are still emerging.

At EquiLend, Mike serves as Director of UX/UI Design Strategy, helping shape a unified securities finance platform across trading, post-trade, data, and books-and-records workflows. The work combines design systems, product architecture, expert systems, and enterprise SDLC-aware delivery.

Mike previously ran UX and user research at Bridgewater Associates, served as Director of User Experience at McGarryBowen (Dentsu), worked with Microsoft’s Advanced Reading Technologies Group on prototypes for tablet-based periodicals and ran his own media-oriented design studio, Hudson Union. His client work spans Intel, Condé Nast, Reuters, Hearst, Time Inc., Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and other organizations across financial technology, media, publishing, analytics, and emerging technology.

Across those environments, the through-line is consistent: turning complex material into coherent, usable, buildable product systems.