BNY MELLON

Streamlining a wealth management experience

Simplifying daily functions to enable advisers to spend quality time with their clients

Role
UI/UX Design Lead

Project type
SaaS platform

Client
Publicis Sapient for BNY Mellon

Timeline
December 2023 - March 2024

Project responsibilities

Conceptual journey flows | User journey mapping | User personas | Usability testing | Wireframing | UX/UI design | Prototyping (Figma) | Design team management | Design system management

Challenge

BNY Mellon’s adviser platform Nexus® was failing to meet advisers expectations for setting up investor accounts and came with a host of issues, causing delays in account opening, impacting client attraction and retention.

User pain points

• Outdated 20+ year old application requiring constant workarounds

• Onboarding and maintenance processes were fragmented and inefficient

• Manual data entry, inconsistent field structures, and legacy systems cause delays and errors

• User journeys didn’t support the customisation needs of different client personas

• UI/UX not intuitive or user-friendly

Objectives

Our goal was to enhance BNY Mellon’s clients customer retention and attract new prospects. To achieve this we aimed to improve the product UX through the following objectives:

• Develop design solutions to leverage the award winning Pershing X Wove platform

• Create seamless, intuitive investor account opening journeys across multiple types

• Streamline internal processes and reduce manual interventions

• Design a robust, scalable, and modern data architecture

• Enable faster time-to-market for enhancements

Solution

Through extensive user research, iterative design, and testing, the team created a dev ready product packed with user-centered optimised journeys and enhanced features that exceeded client expectations.

Product enhancements

New product features

Bulk edits
Ability to select client or account details to edit across multiple clients or accounts

Templates
Introduced the ability to create, save, and access reusable data entry fields

The design approach

How it all came together
We approached design through gathering insights to help drive a user-centered product solution.

1. Discover

A comprehensive set of discovery sessions were run over the course of 20 weeks. Feedback was shaped into actionable insights to inform new user journeys and UX/UI design.

Key discovery findings

Research was undertaken with four of BNY Mellons clients to understand user needs and pain points of using the Nexus platform. A synthesis of data surfaced 8 core pain points which translate into implications and opportunities for the future state journey.

• Lengthy process for manual data entry
  “There are so many old fields that aren’t really needed, and most aren’t even relevant to corporate accounts”

• Unintuitive fields and functionality
  “There are quite a few gimmicks on the platform which we’ve found ways to work around”

• Parties and accounts are tightly coupled
  “To update the address for one person we have to update manually across all their accounts”

• Lacking parent-child hierarchy across parties
  “Understanding why settlements have failed is critical for us—if we know the issue is with our clients we can initiate sanctions”

• Mandatory GIA set up on account opening
  “We have over 1000 GIA accounts that aren’t used, clogging up MI"

• Lack of communication around updates & errors
  “We manually assign people to check all of the fields before we open the account which can take up to 48 hours"

Competitive analysis

We researched businesses that demonstrated best-in-class UX/UI to provide inspiration and help construct a set of design principles.

Adviser archetypes

Updated archetypes were created to represent what user needs, goals, and behaviours were based on completing investor setups and maintenance tasks.

2. Design

Design principles

I worked with the CX lead and stakeholders to define a set of design principles. These acted as a shared set of rules and values that helped guide decision-making and ensure consistency across the product.

Journey maps

Journey maps were created based of a 6-week discovery phase of work to concept out updates to account opening flows.

Hi-fidelity journey designs

Using the journey maps as the guiding framework, we used the Wove design system to build out hi-fidelity journey prototypes for each account opening journey and maintenance journeys.

Wove design system

Test prototypes

I lead the UX/UI design to complete 11 user journeys that included:

• 8 account types (GIA, ISA, SIPP etc.)
• 3 new maintenance paths (templares, bulk edits, approval flows)

We planned to test ‘happy path’ journeys with the original group of users to gain insights to help shape the final designs. These user journeys aimed to benefit over 80% of the client base.

GIA account opening journey

Business benefits

–  Reduction in support requests and complains
–  Reduction in technology complexities

–  Design System foundational components to support efficient and scalable future platform enhancements

Project team

• Principle strategist Andrew Tan

• CX&I manager Emma Kenworthy

• Product director Prateek Kulshreshtha

• Product manger Ravi Bardia

• UX/UI design lead Tim Wolf

• UX designer Hannah Yong

• UI designer Tian Huang

• Data strategy director Ashis Patel


• Data strategist Kamalendu Chatterjee


• Data strategist Mayur Sharma