iknowa

Trust is the whole game in construction trades, and the industry has never had a system for it.

A tradesperson's skills, qualifications, accreditations and track record live in a drawer, a dozen PDFs and word of mouth. The property owner hiring them has no reliable way to verify any of it, and no protection if a job goes wrong. Getting insured or accredited meant heavy paperwork and slow, opaque processes. On the property side, leaseholders, freeholders, landlords and managing agents were juggling portfolios, projects and contractors across email, spreadsheets and phone calls. Two sides who depend on each other, both held back by friction, paperwork and a lack of verified trust — in a sector where renewables work especially demands assurance.

iknowa brings every part of professional protection under one platform, built around verification.

The centrepiece is the Trade Passport — a verified digital profile proving a business is compliant, insured and trustworthy, and the gateway to issuing FCA-regulated Insurance Backed Guarantees, winning better projects and standing out to clients. Onboarding was rebuilt to be interactive and progressive — create an account, submit trade details, receive your Trade Passport, issue your policy — clearing verification without the drop-off that heavy KYC causes. Trades and property each get role-aware dashboards. On top sits the working layer trades actually need: an approved contractor network, collaborative project estimation and drafting, and client management. The whole thing is wrapped in regulated infrastructure — FCA-regulated cover, deposit protection, and Government-approved alternative dispute resolution.

iknowa went from concept to a regulated, industry-backed platform — launched at Google's London HQ to executive partners. Trades can now get covered in as little as three hours, carrying a verified Trade Passport that gives the trade the one thing it always lacked: portable, provable credibility. The progressive onboarding replaced a paperwork-heavy process that shed users; the role-aware dashboards collapsed work scattered across email and spreadsheets into one place; and the platform now sits on FCA-regulated, RICS/RIBA/HM Land Registry-aligned infrastructure with Government-approved dispute resolution — the trusted backbone the trade had been missing.

I came in to lead UI and UX across the whole platform — both sides of a two-sided marketplace, which is one of the harder things to get right in product. Get it wrong and you optimise one side into the ground while the other starves. The engagement ran in phases, and included an in-person workshop and a full working day on site with the team — this was hands-on, embedded product work, not a deck delivered from arm's length.

The insight that anchored everything was that **verification is the product**, not a feature bolted on the side. In construction trades the thing that's actually broken is trust — so the Trade Passport became the spine the rest of the platform hung off. Everything followed from that: progressive onboarding so good trades didn't drop out, role-aware dashboards so a sole trader and a managing agent each got a view that made sense, and the working layer — approved contractor networks, shared project estimation, client management — so the platform became somewhere work got done, not just a place to be listed. The estimation tool in particular went through real iteration with the team, down to making the interface legible for trades working on site.

This is the work that taught me the construction-trades domain from the inside: verification pipelines, FCA-regulated compliance, multi-role permissions, and document-heavy workflows where getting the data model and the trust model right matters more than anything on the surface.