American Multinational Financial Services
8 months
Lead Designer
Figma, Figjam, MURAL
Multi-squad structure
3 Product Managers
3 Systems Analysts
3 Business Analysts
20 developers
The name of this client and further details were omitted for confidentiality purposes.
Our client supports financial advisors who open brokerage accounts for institutional investors.
In order to open an account, investors need to review and agree to the accounts that are being opened and their terms and conditions. However, investors  are forced to read through long digital PDF documents full of legal jargon which is hard to understand and time consuming.
Our client needed a simplified experience to accelerate account opening and reduce errors due to unclear information during the signing process.
I set out to design a new click-to-sign, financial account opening experience to increase STP (Straight Through Processing) rates.
The personas were defined collectively across the product ecosystem. For this click-to-sign account opening experience, we focused on two personas.
Institutional Investors are high-net worth clients that pool money from multiple individuals or organizations to invest in financial assets.
To understand the details of the accounts they are opening in the simplest terms
The flexibility to make edits to the details of their account package when required
A more modern experience instead of wading through digital PDF’s consisting of 50+ pages
Financial advisors for institutional investors are professionals who help clients manage their money.
Their investors to review and agree to the account package details with limited guidance and assistance.
The option to let their clients (investors) add or edit account details if data like their personal information changes
The account opening process is initiated in the system by the advisor. As our primary persona is the institutional investor, the click-to-sign account opening product is most relevant to steps 2 and 3 of the process below.
The advisor works with the client to create an account package that suits their investment needs.
To build a package they:
Select different account types (individual, joint, or trust account)
Select “features” for the account (Adding beneficiaries, trusted contacts, transfer of assets)
Put in a request for additional documentation required from the investor
Once the advisor puts the account package together, they send the details to the investor for their review and authorization.
The investor will:
Review the account features and details, ensuring they are correct
Acknowledge the terms and conditions of opening the account
Upload documents when required
Finally, after reviewing all of the details and making the necessary edits, the investor authorizes the opening of their account package.
“How might we create a simplified and flexible account signing experience for institutional, high net-worth investors?”
The existing experience included reviewing bloated PDF’s of 50+ pages. This visualization is for illustration as I am unable to access images of the existing experience since rolling off the project.
Implementing a non-linear signing experience which organizes all the key tasks for each account gives users the flexibility to complete the sections they can right away, saving other sections for later.
Investor’s advisors often did not have the all the information about their clients on hand. Investor edits gives investors the ability to make changes and fill in gaps in their information to speed up the account opening process.
This stacked card layout was created by myself and the development team as it was not part of the existing design system. This change, albeit small, was a noticeable improvement from signing a PDF form.
It was difficult to manage the myriad of designs as I was working on new features, in-development features, and future vision features all at the same time. To combat this, I started creating components about a quarter way into the project, but it would have been helpful to start earlier.
If I had more time, I would prioritize creating a more delightful, visual experience, as reviewing financial account details is arduous and takes a lot of mental energy for our users. I plan to work more closely with the design system team in so I can negotiate with them when they advocate for the reduction of custom coding and styling.
Outside of the immediate design problem, being the only designer to a team of 20 developers meant that I had to attend many agile ceremonies, while fielding impromptu meetings with developers alongside. In the future, I would like to block out more time for deep work which results in more exhaustive design explorations.
We released the product to 3 organizations as part of our pilot, receiving positive feedback that it was
“the right experience that gives the flexibility that we need”.
