Designing a Bond distribution platform for Wealth Managers and Finance Firms
MY ROLE
User Research, User Interviews, Journey Mapping, Sketching, Wireframing, Screen Flows, Visual Design, Interaction Design
YEAR
2022 - 2023
PLATFORM
Web
Challenge
India’s fixed income market has grown to be over Rs.100 trillion and it is expected to continually grow in the future. With increasing fixed income asset needs, Wealth management entities like wealth distribution partners, independent financial advisors, advisory firms, chartered accountants, family offices, and corporate treasuries need to make decisions spanning different clients, financial goals, risk appetite and timelines.
Credavenue (now Yubi) a credit marketplace that allows users to discover, invest or borrow credit, wanted us to help them design a bond marketplace, among other fixed income securities. Their request was to streamline the investment process for their users who currently make these transactions over call. Design an all in one bond platform that allows firms to discover, share, map, monitor and invest in bonds.
Understanding the product, the brand and the audience
Bonds, although is a well known concept, we had to dig deeper. We did our secondary research to understand the asset class. We learnt about all the important metrics that are used to classify bonds and learnt about how investors make decisions on buying bonds. This information helped us communicate better with the Yubi team.
We then sat down with them to understand their customers, their business and the challenges. We did this by various workshops like empathy mapping, User Centred Design Canvas, etc to understand their expectations from the platform
We also did user research by inviting 5 individuals. 3 of them belong to welath managing firms and the other were HNIs who directly invested without the help of wealth management firms. This helped us understand their side of the story and helped us generate insights. We then designed 3 user personas based on the type of interviewees.
Getting Started with concepts
I facilitated several design sprints with the team, to map out the task flows, and come up with sketch ideas on how to solve the problems identified. . I created concept sketches, exploring how to streamline the process, provide users clear instructions, and build trust throughout the process.
Onbaording
The onboarding was an important step. Since bonds are a highly regulated space, lots of information had to be processed. This was also true for all the members that had to join the platform from their team. We therefore, broke the onboarding process into two parts.
The first step is when the first member (usually the firm manager), onbaords the platform. We made this step fast in order for the customer to be able to enter the platform. Step two is onboarding the rest of his/her team on the platform. This could be done in two ways . 1 the manager can send invites to his team via email, who will return will follow the same step to onboard himself and two where the manager can upload a excel sheet with all the information.
Exploration
The delivery starts when the users fills in the KYC form, puts their delivery address and loads the account with minimum 1000 rupees. During the delivery, the dashboard keeps track of the delivery progress. We designed various iterations until we landed on the design that we felt doesnt take up the entire darshbaord and still lets users gaze the capabilties and features of the app.
Mapping bond purchases
We also designed dashboard screens to . let users handle their finaces on a desktop as well. We iterated on many layouts until we we desided to created a split screen experience where the left side would also keeps the total balance intact while the left side house the transactions and the forex calculator. This also had impact on the delivery and interaction changes, therefore we redesigned the interaction patterns for desktop.
Portfolio management
The product launch was successful. Many reviewers commented and remarked about the usefulness for the product. We went on to design the insurance and lending features. We also later worked on integrating Bookmyforex, a leading forex company that makemytrip acquired. Together with bookmyforex and tripmoney card, users could now carry money aborad in cash,card or check formats.
Negotiation/purchasing bonds
The product launch was successful. Many reviewers commented and remarked about the usefulness for the product. We went on to design the insurance and lending features. We also later worked on integrating Bookmyforex, a leading forex company that makemytrip acquired. Together with bookmyforex and tripmoney card, users could now carry money aborad in cash,card or check formats.
We also did user research by inviting 5 individuals. 3 of them belong to welath managing firms and the other were HNIs who directly invested without the help of wealth management firms. This helped us understand their side of the story and helped us generate insights. We then designed 3 user personas based on the type of interviewees.
We based our designs based on few key insights:
1. Family offices and wealth managing firms have multiple wealth managers. Each of whom have their own clients.
Wealth managing firms need to share information about investments with their clients before they make the trade.
Wealth managing firms bulk purchase bonds for multiple clients at once.
Users need to maintain and track their client’s portfolios and report it back to their clients.
What happened next
The product launch was successful. Many reviewers commented and remarked about the usefulness for the product. We went on to design the insurance and lending features. We also later worked on integrating Bookmyforex, a leading forex company that makemytrip acquired. Together with bookmyforex and tripmoney card, users could now carry money aborad in cash,card or check formats.
Look and Feel
Since this platform was to help the company onbaord their current and core user base, trust became an important factor, we wanted to look technically sound but also also simple and capable to ensure security and trust.