I'm Matt Barham, founder of Onyx Studios — a UX researcher and innovation strategist. Most of my career was built inside Mastercard Digital Labs, a team chartered to bring structured innovation to enterprise clients: federal government, global card issuers, regional banks, prepaid providers, healthcare startups, and more — an innovation lab consistently recognized among the world's best.
What I actually do is de-risk — ultra-deep planning and cheap pressure-testing of the assumptions a strategy rests on, before they turn into expensive mistakes. It comes in two doors: founders pre-launch, making sure they build the right thing; and product teams post-launch, finding what's quietly broken and costing them. A second of friction, a wrong assumption, a feature nobody needs — multiplied at scale, those are the most expensive kind of small.
I learned this in payments, where getting it wrong is measured in billions of transactions and regulatory consequences. Fintech was the crucible, not the cage — the discipline travels to any domain where the cost of being wrong is high. Onyx Studios is that work in its most useful form: faster, more direct, without the organizational overhead that delays the insight that matters.