ABOUT WORK CV CONTACT

A tax regime where the tax service does the math for you — no accountant, almost no reporting.

Alfa-Bank was in the first wave of banks to launch it, in 2022 — and the first major bank to offer the switch in one window. I designed it from scratch.

PRODUCT DESIGNB2B FINTECHREGULATEDCROSS-PLATFORM

The Russian first
automatic tax regime

Alfa-Bank. Accounting team — AUSN

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In July 2022 the government launched an experiment: a tax regime where the tax service does the math for you. Banks joined in waves — Alfa was in the first, and became the first major bank to let clients switch in one window, right inside the bank. I was the one who turned this brand-new, never-before-designed product into something an ordinary business owner could use without an accountant.

ROLE

Middle product designer. Solo designer from the halfway point

TEAM

2–3 teams in parallel · 2 designers → just me. Analysts, engineers, a lawyer, product owner

YEAR

2022

PLATFORMS

Web · mobile web

CONTEXT

AUSN is the automated simplified tax system — a government experiment running from 2022 to 2027 across four regions. The idea is to take the busywork off small business owners.

Almost no reporting, no insurance contributions, and the tax service calculates the tax every month itself — from cash register, bank and personal-account data. The rate depends on what you pick: 8% on income, or 20% on income minus expenses.

Why it's hard to design: it's new. No patterns, no references, and the data arrives from the outside — from the tax service, in raw legal form. A mistake in the interface costs the client real money and fines.

What AUSN is

WHY IT'S HARD

Nobody had designed a product like this before. No guidelines, no competitors, no ready integration — and the whole regime speaks the language of the tax code.

The challenge

The job cut both ways: translate legal wording and raw tax data into something a business owner understands, while keeping it correct enough for the regulator. You can't be wrong for the client or for the law.

I joined as a mid-level product designer. To hit a tight deadline, two or three teams built AUSN in parallel — between all of them there were two designers, then the other one left, and from the halfway point the whole design was on me. The final design is entirely mine.

My role

I worked side by side with analysts, engineers and a legal advisor, and picked apart the tax logic with the lawyer until it made sense. Research, service blueprint, flows, information architecture, hi-fi, and defending the work to the bank and the tax service — all mine.

How I worked

RESEARCH

Service blueprint, customer journey map, and a competitive teardown of ~16 banks.

LOGIC

Turning tax law and raw forms into flows — with the lawyer, until it made sense.

MVP

Ship, show to the tax service, get their sign-off and edits, then finish for real.

DESIGN

Dashboard, permissions, markers, tax sections, mobile web — all hi-fi.

DEFEND

Hold every decision up to the bank's business side and the regulator.

To see the whole product, I built a service blueprint of AUSN end to end — lining up every team involved, finding the weak spots, and mapping where the service should go next.

Research

Next to it sat a customer journey map, from "first hearing about the regime" to using it with confidence.

In parallel I ran a competitive teardown of the ~16 banks bidding for the tender — reading their landing pages to see what they planned to build, and where we could be sharper.

Turning law into an interface

PROCESS

The hard part was the tax data. I took the official tax forms apart field by field and rebuilt them into screens a person could read — but in a shape the tax service could accept and read back without ambiguity.

With engineering we mapped the operation and category reference books, how transactions tie to the tax base, and the single-tax-account balance logic — inside the limits of what front and back could do.

I got the logic out of our lawyer: asking her to explain it like I was five, until I actually understood it. Only then I could make it simple for the client.

I asked our lawyer to explain it like I was five — then made it simpler.

MVP and the regulator

We didn't work with the tax service the usual "design, then build" way — we worked in loops. We shipped an MVP, showed it to them, got their sign-off and their edits, and only then went back to finish the real thing.

The tax service was effectively a second client. Their constraints had to sit inside the design at every step, and every decision had to hold up in front of the regulator — not just the bank's business side.

First full flow

Prototype for the Federal Tax team with some options to choose

MVP 1

MVP 2

Waiting for the Federal Tax to join our meeting

Proud to start the trend for carpet backgrounds

The product,endto end

WHAT'S INSIDE

Landing

Main dashboard

Permissions status model

Transactions & markers

Income & calculated tax

Landing

Explains the regime in plain words: who it fits, what the single tax account is, how everything gets counted. Signing up takes two steps — fill in a consent form and wait for the tax service to reply.

Main dashboard

One place for everything: the state of the regime, a tax calendar with what's due and what's overdue, and an operation history you can retag by hand.

Permissions status model

The bank only touches a client's tax data with their consent. I designed a permissions model where the client decides what the bank can access, and can see at a glance what's on and what's off.

Transactions and markers

The heart of the regime — how every operation gets tagged for tax. Instead of dry codes from the tax handbook, I gave people plain markers: you see what lands in the tax base and why, and can fix the tagging by hand when an operation is unusual.

Income and calculated tax

The income-tax and calculated-tax sections show what's due now and what hasn't hit the single payment yet. Tax adds up across quarters, debt included.

Working around
what didn't exist yet

Being first in the country meant parts of the plumbing simply weren't there. There was no automatic sync between the tax service and the bank: when a client paid the tax directly, our system never heard about it. So I designed a clear flow where the client marks the tax as paid themselves, so we don't count it twice.

And because of Apple and Android store restrictions on Russian banks, the bank decided priority flows would ship in mobile web first — which I designed too.

Results

250

businesses on AUSN in the whole country when we were connecting it with the tax service — the starting line

1st wave

Alfa among the first banks — and the first major one to offer the switch in one window, inside the bank (Aug 2022)

~25%

Alfa's share of the AUSN market today — the regime has since grown to ~444k businesses

Honest framing: I designed the one-window onboarding right at the start, when the whole country had ~250 AUSN users across four pilot regions. The market numbers here are today's — the product I helped launch early grew to hundreds of thousands after I'd moved on to other teams.

What I took away

REFLECTION

The biggest challenge was getting into the legal guts of a brand-new regime and chewing them down so the client wouldn't have to. The second was accepting that a product this complex stays complex no matter what — the designer's job is to find the spots where you can make it a little simpler. And working with a government body was a first for me, and genuinely useful.

The lesson I kept: when you feel like you understand everything, you understand nothing. The trick is admitting it and going to other people for their expertise — not playing the hero who'll "just knock it out real quick."

Want to talk it through?

Drop me a line →