Cyence

A complete financial services ecosystem

Project overview

VISION

A digital platform which almost any kind of financial organisation can use to offer an investment offering to their customers that is unique, secure, and compliant with evolving regulations.

This is hard for every individual business to do by themselves in a cost-effective and timely way, and Cyence bridges that gap.

MY ROLE

As the design lead, I played a pivotal role in shaping the user experience across the entire ecosystem. This included defining the experience strategy, building the foundational design system, and designing interfaces for all platforms and tools within the ecosystem. I also collaborated on branding and marketing initiatives to ensure a cohesive brand experience.

Mapping the ecosystem

To establish a foundation for the user experience across the entire platform ecosystem, we began by developing a detailed experience map. This map serves as a reference point, outlining the granular needs of each user persona and how specific elements within the platform intended to address those needs.

This slice of the mapping in the example below demonstrates the mapping from the persona, their needs (represented by the high-level breakdown of their journey) , and the platform solution (with the investor onboarding solution shown here as an example).

This also serves as an opportunity map, helping prioritize the platform capabilities to be invested in.

WORK SAMPLES

Investor experience, account opening

Every module of the platform has a distinct experience strategy, with it’s own challenges, success factors, and pain-points to solve for.

The account opening module is the most demanding workflow in the investor experience, and is tightly constrained by the needs of the account custodian - the vendor who provides the investment account and it’s financial functionality. On the other hand clients need this to be an efficient and painless experience for their investors, so it is not a barrier to onboarding.

To get to this vision, the team followed a three-stage process:

1. Understand current investor pain-points

Investors who need to open investing accounts themselves (vs having and advisor or representative open one for them) are a subset of the overall investor audience.

Discovery of investor needs in this space used three approaches:

Input from the design and research teams in the client businesses, who have direct access to the specific personas that their business addresses.
Access to past projects that core team building this capability have worked on, and the library of insights about investor needs, journey aps, and usability test results.
Direct interviews with investors, screened for those who have opened their own accounts and used guidance in some for for managing their investments.

2. Understand the custodial requirements

This exploration was done through formal conversations with custodial providers, and an analysis of their forms. It revealed a fascinating mix of modern technology and legacy practices. Custodians provide modern APIs for anyone who wants to build solutions, but also rely heavily on robust but aging mainframe systems for core functions. Understanding this blend of new and old is crucial for developing solutions that effectively integrate with custodian workflows and optimize the solution.

3. Designing and delivering the experience

The design of the experience for the Account Opening module followed a three-stage process. The first stage was simply building the end-to-end form to ensure that core concepts like white-labeling, modular assembly, regulatory requirements, experience requirements, and integration with custodial providers was working as intended. Next, this was launched with several clients, who stress-tested the system in real-life and provided feedback which informed the next round of refinements and corrections. The final round, in progress at the time of documentation, is optimizing the experience for devices, systematizing the architecture, upgrading the tech stack, and expanding the integrations.

An example of the multi-layered complexity of this project, a key factor in delivering the Account Opening module is that in addition to meeting the needs and expectations of the investors opening the account, the workflow needs to support different kinds of businesses who all have a different approach to presenting their offering to investors.

WORK SAMPLES

Admin experience, risk measurement

Financial service firm administrators like Alexa are responsible for managing user access, entitlements, and platform configuration to support the business processes within the firm. This includes tasks like setting up new users, updating permissions, and ensuring compliance with regulations. They work closely with different departments to maintain user access and troubleshoot any issues.

Snapshot of the persona

Pains

Manual, Time-Consuming Processes
Alexa's team spends a significant amount of time on repetitive tasks like manually updating user information and entitlements across multiple systems. This leaves them with little time for more strategic work like process improvement and audits.

Data Inconsistency and Errors
The reliance on manual data entry and updates across different tools leads to inconsistencies and errors. This can create security risks and make it difficult to track user access accurately.

Inefficient Workflows
The current workflow requires communication and collaboration with multiple teams (e.g., User Admin) to resolve access issues, causing delays and frustration.

Limited Visibility and Control
Alexa struggles to efficiently track and manage user entitlements and access privileges across the firm. This makes it challenging to ensure compliance and conduct effective audits.

Gains

Experience vision