Digitising Wealth Onboarding
UX/ UI Design / Workshops / Stakeholder Management
10 min
Setting the scene
Imagine yourself as the COO of Evelyn Partners - one of the UK’s largest wealth management firms. Unfortunately you're faced with a manual, cumbersome, and time-consuming onboarding process, which is your critical gateway for revenue. You realise it's time to focus on onboarding because it will enhance both client satisfaction and business growth. You are already involved with Backbase, who was helping with your client portal and ask them to collaborate with your team to come up with a streamlined onboarding MLP.
The Task
As the UX Designer from Backbase, my role was to collaborate with Evelyn Partners' stakeholders and my Backbase team to redesign their onboarding process, reducing the time required, improving the client and colleague experience, and ensuring that all regulatory and compliance requirements were still met.
I was purposefully selected for this project because of my expertise in running workshops, rapid prototyping, and solving complex UX challenges quickly. Additionally, my native English skills—paired with a touch of Australian wit—enabled me to build strong rapport with stakeholders right from the start.
Onboarding Workshop Board
Workshop
We kicked off the project with a two-day intensive workshop that included key decision makers from both the Evelyn Partners and Backbase teams. The goal of these intensive sessions was to gather enough information to start visualising a prototype to show the COO.
During the workshop I...
I analysed the existing onboarding workflow, mapping out each step to identify redundancies and bottlenecks.
I facilitated various stakeholder interviews to gather technical restraints, business goals, user needs and compliance requirements.
Building components
Three problems to solve
Too Many Manual Tasks: While wealth onboarding is inherently detailed, the process was bogged down by too many unnecessary and manual tasks for both the client and Evelyn’s representatives.
Excessively Long Timeframe: The original process took between six months to a year to complete, which was far too long. Such delays risked losing prospective clients and hampered business growth.
Lack of Transparency: There was little visibility for clients throughout the onboarding process, leaving them unclear about their progress and what steps remained. This lack of transparency caused frustration and disengagement.
Project Goals
Have positive User Acceptance Testing (UAT) Feedback - score above 80%
Improve Efficiency - reduce time spent on specific tasks by 30%
High Satisfaction Scores - above 80%
Reduce onboarding time by 50%
Use as much of the Backbase onboarding product as possible to reduce build time and cost.
Key screens creating a new prospect - Evelyn representative view
Tackling the problems
Through constant engagements, I collaborated closely with Evelyn’s onboarding representatives to refine the MLP experience for both prospects and representatives. I conducted several rounds of surveys, interviews, and user testing to shape a more streamlined and user-centric process. However, given the high-net-worth profile of Evelyn’s clients and the corresponding access limitations, I relied significantly on the insights provided by the onboarding team. Additionally, I analysed legacy support tickets to proactively address recurring issues. Upon release, Evelyn will actively gather client feedback to continuously enhance and evolve the onboarding experience.
Prospect onboarding - Evelyn representative view
Challenges
We faced numerous technical constraints from both Backbase and Evelyn Partners, but where standard workarounds weren’t feasible, we implemented tailored development solutions. A key achievement was creating a fully internal Forms Application Framework, enabling us to generate custom forms without the limitations of the out-of-the-box Backbase technology. This framework allows for seamless progressive disclosure of form fields, enhancing the flexibility of the onboarding process.
Again, a major challenge also was not getting direct access to onboarding prospects for testing, so I relied heavily on insights from Evelyn’s onboarding representatives.
Onboarding overview - prospect view
Example of a prospect task - filling out a form
Example of a prospect task - uploading documents
Example screens of mobile breakpoint
Results
Although the redesigned onboarding process has not yet been rolled out to clients, we have achieved significant milestones during the MVP stage:
UAT Feedback: 90% of onboarding reps found the new process more intuitive and user-friendly than the previous system.
Efficiency Gains: Testing showed a 40% reduction in time spent on specific tasks, indicating greater future efficiency in client onboarding.
Satisfaction Scores: Post-training surveys reflected a 75% satisfaction rate among reps, signaling a positive response and confidence in the redesign.
Projected Improvements: Efficiency gains suggest client onboarding time could drop to three months or less, meeting our initial goals.
