Capital Markets Commercial Client Portal:
Helping our client create a best-in-class omnichannel experience for their diverse set of commercial clients
When I worked in strategy consulting, one of my favorite and most impactful projects was to create the strategy and vision for a transformed Capital Markets Commercial Client Portal.
During this 1 year client engagement, I worked in a cross-functional team of business consultants, visual designers, and client employees to lead discovery into our client’s commercial users and transform existing personas and journeys into an actionable strategy.
Position
UX Research Lead
Client
Top 30 U.S. Bank
Timeline
1 Year
Tools
Excel, PowerPoint, Sketch, InVision, Jira
Background:
This Bank’s Financial Risk Management (FRM) service assists commercial clients in handling their money smartly in the market. They team up with these clients to figure out and measure how much risk their capital might face. By doing this, they help their clients make informed decisions and safeguard their financial assets.
Clients partner with dedicated account managers at the bank to tailor solutions for their businesses and evaluate risk versus potential gains. The range of financial products available includes foreign exchange, commodities, and interest rate derivatives.
The Opportunity:
Historically, clients primarily interacted with their account managers at the bank, typically via phone or email, to conduct trades and manage their accounts. Although an online portal existed, its adoption was limited, and it often left clients feeling confused.
The Bank engaged my team to research the existing personas and journeys throughout this service, identify existing pain points and opportunities - and ultimately create a vision for an omnichannel experience that was usable, functional, and efficient for both the Bank’s employees and clients alike.
Benchmarking the current state and uncovering opportunities
Stakeholder Interviews
End User Interviews
Demographic/Firmographic Analyses
In order to propose a usable solution, we needed to understand users’ workflows, attributes, and desires
Recruiting the Participants
We worked with our executive sponsors to organize 10 stakeholder interviews with FRM account managers and 30+ end user interviews with commercial users. We first interviewed the stakeholders (account managers) to understand incumbent interaction models - and also to gain access to end user interviewees.
Asking the Right Questions
First, we gathered demographic/firmographic data from each end user to better segment the personas and their respective needs. Then, we dove into users’ day-to-day and how the current FRM experience fit into their responsibilities. Finally, we asked about their pain points and desired future features.
Pulling Out Key Insights
As our interview/survey phase was conducted, we utilized the following to map and synthesize our findings:
Heat map of features + user sentiment
Infographics & charts with demographics, key insights, features, and user quotes
Conveying the varying needs and workflows of different commercial users
Personas
Journeys
Heat Maps
Infographics
Through our discovery, 4 key insights emerged:
Asset Class Differentiation
User attributes and flows depended most on the asset class they were trading - i.e. foreign exchange, commodities, or interest rate derivatives. Client companies often considered their goals & objectives when choosing an asset class, and execution differed a bit between the three.
Self-Service Onboarding & Executions
Most of the users expressed a desire to onboard and execute tasks within the platform themselves - without needing manual assistance from their account managers.
Standard and Intuitive Credentials
Especially since financial transactions were taking place, users wanted more straightforward log-in and e-signature capabilities. In the incumbent platform, users often had to manually sign via fax or their account manager.
So, we created personas and journeys segmented by each of the three asset classes:
In each persona, we included:
Key user demographics i.e. who from the client company was the primary user and stakeholder of this product
Frustrations and needs of the key user
Relative demand for different kinds of features
Actual quotes from the interviews
In each journey, we included:
Happy path, in addition to any alternate steps
User-facing account manager steps
User’s emotional journey throughout
Existing platform features
As well as overarching deliverables to help drive the product roadmap:
A heat map (not pictured) where we had tracked all the existing and potential features of the product, along with an index for relative user demand
A printed infographic placement (not pictured) to summarize our entire research phase to give to our executive stakeholders for reference
Readily Available Financial Advice
Users frequently sought financial advice and context from their account managers, but wanted a way to have contextualized financial context and guidance within the platform where it can be accessed on demand.
Unifying executive stakeholders towards a future state vision
Design Workshops
Once we completed our research phase, we pulled together 20+ executive stakeholders into Design Thinking Workshops & Sessions to:
Validate our findings and align on the incumbent journey (including any nuances not captured in our user research)
Ideate collaboratively on pain points, opportunities, “low hanging fruit”, or “pie in the sky” ideas for the future
Align on a vision and direction for future state experience
Because we were working with so many parts of the business, this step was crucial to ensure we could strategically align and rally the stakeholders towards a vision for the solution and determine actionable next steps.
Our Agenda
Transforming our research into actionable deliverables and recommendations
Visual Designs
Site Mapping
Product Roadmap
Epics & Features
Business Requirements
Leveraging the research for our visual designs
Ultimately, we leveraged our research and insights into greyscale wireframes, low-fi mockups, and high-fi prototypes - all of which we iterated through with our stakeholders.
As the user research lead, I drove stakeholder alignment/steering sessions and helped our visual design lead hone in on impactful and usable designs.
Based on our research and workshop outputs, we also redesigned the primary navigation to be more intuitively grouped and hierarchized for end users.
Developing a product roadmap and identifying actionable next steps
Once our client signed off on our research and visual designs, we started working on the overarching business and product strategy. This of course included a strategic roadmap with recommended goals, milestones, timing, and predicted ROI of this transformation.
And, per our client’s request, we took it a step further and helped to set up an agile Asana board with epics, features, and business requirements populated. With the business, design, and product strategies proposed - we were able to hand these project deliverables off to the client for immediate execution (and follow-up work sold for our firm).
I had an absolute blast working on this project!