NDA Work
Designing internal applications for financial advisors to serve high net worth clients
JP Morgan’s International Private Bank (IPB), specialise in serving high and ultra net worth clients — innovators, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders whose liquidity exceeds $1 million. These clients are managed by financial advisors who leverage technology “BOLT platform” , an internal platform to seamlessly interact with them.
BOLT: It’s an ecosystem of 11 platforms and 120 applications, grouped by application functionality. These applications are geared towards effortlessly navigating
Client onboarding & interactions.
Crafting personalised wealth management strategies.
Accessing data-driven insights, and unlocking unique solutions tailored to each client’s vision.
Users of Bolt:
Front Office(Advisors), Client Services, Operations, Marketing, Events, and Senior Management. Each of these internal users utilizes Bolt to cater to different client needs.

My focus area:
Simplifying Client Onboarding, by enhancing “Intake Application” User Experience
Product Vision: Provide a seamless and transparent onboarding experience that is best in class for high net worth clients.
My role-
I am an individual contributor for this project, but design approvals are led my design manager.
I work with 6 product managers, 6 technical lead, 2 lead researcher, 1 content designer, 10+ frontend developers, 4 Backend engineers, 2 legal advisors, and 3 business analysts
Duration- 9 months and ongoing
Product OKR- open an account in 2 & 5 days for simple & complex respectively.
Still 2 & 5 days isn’t too long to open an account?
Retail customer like me can open an account within minutes because its highly standardised, almost always within a single regulatory environment, low risk & high volume by definition.
However, private high net worth client customers – “are all different”
Cross borders, cross jurisdictions.
Often banking non-individuals.
Often many more parties to the accounts.
Significantly more money involved.
Financially complex.
Low volume, high risk, high margin.
Deep dive into the Onboarding journey
Prospecting the client
Onboarding the client

Onboarding Journey
Six step process-
To open an account at the private back, mainly six steps are involved and three types of users are involved- “ Front officer/Advisor, Onboarding team, and Onboarding officer”.

Research Q1 2023, Onboarding Academy
Onboarding Academy training :
Sessions: 7 days, 27 hours of trainings
People: 111 attended the onboarding academy
Roles: Front office & Onboarding employees
Levels: Banker professionals, analysts, associates, VPs, EDs, MDs
We conducted 25 interviews over 7 days to understand current perception about the intake application and below were the results-
Theme 1: Tools not stable The tools are not stable enough from a tech point of view to support this way of operating and provide full confidence on their reliability. This is a recurring strong issue with our strategy of expanding before deepening.
Theme 2: DocuSign(third party) does not feel fully fit for purpose: experience requires 60+ clicks; live/co-view needed; correction flow & flexibility with changes; notifications; flexibility of docs pack; consider excluding SAF & PLS; DocuSign for corporates; iPads to meetings to do DocuSign with the client (current legal barrier)
Theme 3: Systems not flexible. In a white glove service, allowing for flexibility is key, especially in an ever more digital world. We receive a lot of feedback for the need for flexibility with pack (blank, partial pre-fill, full pre-fill). Explore flexibility of doing DocuSign but with an option to have it blank — the back up for FO is paper, which we want to move away.
Theme 4: Disjointed experience Both the advisors and the client experiences are too many and too disjointed. From P360, to Intake, to meeting a client in-person, too many experiences are required. We should focus on a fully integrated future.
Theme 6: Intermediaries are very common for onboarding clients but the tools do not include a journey for intermediaries. This creates long, inefficient, manual workarounds to allow intermediaries in the onboarding client journey.
Theme 7: Language is confusing Language on Intake is sometimes confusing and has the risk to slow down the process because of language frictions. Research, Design and Content team action to deepen the product so that language fits the mental model — with global cultural awareness too (EMEA vs APAC).
Theme 8: Initiation process is slow due to ticket duplications. Multiple tickets for the same party allowed.

Vision: In our efforts to enhance and improve the overall onboarding experience, we needed to think about how that user journey could be initiated and what opportunities we have to help reduce the amount error we see in Intake 2.0 like duplication of tickets. By optimising the early stages of the experience, we have the chance to enhance what advisors will see as their first impression to a seamless onboarding process.
Research: 5 deep dive sessions with advisors to understand the initiation process-
Current problems:
Duplicate Ticket Issue: Multiple tickets for the same party allowed slowing down the initiation process.
Locking of information is not happening
One banker said “Once we were supposed to receive 20M from a client and because of the bad initial onboarding experience he only invested 10M.”


Brainstorming:



First iteration






Usability testing with users:
Participants: 5 EMEA Bankers, London based
Topics we validated:
Current experience of initiating the onboarding process.
Launching Intake 2.0 from Profile 360 & the number of steps it takes
The information requested upfront in the initiation steps.
Advisor’s understanding of the flow of data (including the logic of locking in data)
Clarity of the overall user flow & the designs that facilitate it.
Feedback:
Advisors appreciated having multiple opportunities to modify the information before entering Intake
Advisors felt that too many clicks were required from them and that the steps could be reduced to not feel unnecessarily long.
To improve clarity on the navigation panel further details on what the prospecting stages entail should be provided and clarity on how that process is later on updated


Iteration 2
Vision: Enhance UI and incorporate feedback
Less clicks ” combine fields”



Usability testing research sessions:
Participants: 6 EMEA Bankers, London & Milan
Topics we validated
Launching Intake 2.0 from Profile 360
The length, ease and clarity of the initiation steps
The information requested upfront in profile360 and the initiation steps
Advisor’s understanding of the flow of information, including the logic of locking of data
Research results
What we successfully improved?
✔ Amended the information requested to better reflect our advisor’s work flow.
✔ Reduced the steps and minimised the number of clicks required
✔ Increased specificity and relevancy in what is shown
✔ Improved clarity around the process
What else we can improve?
📈 Provide more transparency what the progress bars indicate so that advisors are aware of the their current data picture and how to improve it.
📈 Reconsider how we can re-label platform and booking branch in a way that is clear, distinct and does not create confusion.
📈 Add flexibility in what is shown in the Intake 2.0 ticket creation page
📈 Use a longitudinal format to present the initiation steps as advisors perceive it to be more straightforward and quicker to complete.
“What if use the same Intake and improve the initiation steps, this feels different app”.
Challenges:
Interfacing with Legacy Systems:
Challenge: The current legacy banking system uses outdated protocols and data formats that are not easily compatible with modern frontend technologies. For example, currently we are using Olympic as the technical database which is quite outdated and integration with “BOLT” is not compatible, it slows down the UX and ultimately slowing the 2 -5 days vision.Systems are fragmented:
Challenge: Apps inside BOLT are not integrated, which creates dis-jointed experience. For example, if the data could flow direct from profile 360 app to onboarding, then the front officer need not to fill the data.Feeding roadmap : Balancing Short-Term Fixes with Long-Term vison Challenge: UX team is still too reactive or often involved too late in projects. More transparency on what is underway in the research roadmap. Share more at senior levels and more regularly
Third party integration: issues with DocuSign to include in the existing intake app.
Legal issues: Example DocuSign for e-signature during meetings and including intermediaries to the systems
Learning:
Understanding complex financial products.
Designing for high net worth clients ” All are different”.
Strategic work, like how we can improve the overall UX not just UI level
Influencing UX centric methods
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