From $2 billion to $10 billion
This case study demonstrates how I uncovered the factors affecting the growth of a financial service. The outcome of this research helped the service grow by 5x, from $2 billion USD to $10 billion USD.
This case also details my strategic approach to overcoming stakeholder scepticism and successfully rebuilding the Product team’s trust in User Research.
Background
In 2022, a Global Private Bank launched an investment service that caters to the needs of clients who prefer a collaborative approach for investing. Despite its potential, the service was struggling to achieve its projected growth target.
A Roadblock for Research
I proposed interviewing Advisors to understand the root cause of low adoption. However, the product leadership denied direct access to Advisors, citing negative experiences from previous user interviews.
My Goal
My goal for this project was twofold:
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Uncover why Advisors are struggling to bring clients onto the financial service.
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Win the trust of Product Leadership in the research process.
The Plan
Since 1-on-1 interviews were off the table, I proposed a lean, quantitative-first approach. I designed a survey to understand the Advisor’s point of view.
Designing the Survey
Before creating the survey, I worked with the design team to break down the ‘client onboarding’ journey into 8 distinct stages.​​
Then, I drafted a survey that gathered 3 layers of data.
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Top 3 roadblocks: Advisors were asked to select the 3 (of 8) stages they perceived as the primary roadblocks to onboarding new clients. The Advisors were also asked to give a brief qualitative description of the specific challenges at those points.
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Ease of Use Score: For each stage of the journey, Advisors provided an "Ease-of-Use" score for the supporting digital tools.
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NPS: Finally, Advisors gave a Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure the likelihood of recommending the service to a client.
Visualising the responses
Once the survey responses were in, the answers were visualised for the stakeholders.
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A bar chart was used to show the '% of Advisors who found each stage as a roadblock.'
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A line graph showcased how the perceived 'ease of use' varied across the workflow.
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A distribution curve was used to show variation in the ‘Net Promoter Score’ across Advisors.
The reaction
These insights were well-received by the product leadership, as they gave a clear visual indication of where the problem lies and what needs to be done. The 4 key bottlenecks that were hindering the growth of the service were:
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Identifying eligible clients.
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Demonstrating benefits.
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Generating investment proposals.
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Calculating fees.
The product leadership moved from being “not on board” to actively asking me to reach out to the participants to get more detailed insights on some of the comments.
Prioritisation & Execution
Once detailed insights about the bottlenecks were gathered, I facilitated a workshop with the cross-functional team to ideate solutions and get a consensus on which areas to prioritise. We considered factors such as technical feasibility, resource availability, and budget.
We prioritised 'Identifying eligible clients', ​'Generating investment proposals' & 'Calculating fees', because they promised high impact through making design changes to the existing toolset.
‘Demonstrating Benefits’ was deferred to a later phase, as it involved building a new demonstration tool that did not exist.
Results
​The team spent the next 3 quarters making the identified enhancements and releasing the updates.
Following this, we repeated the survey to evaluate if the Advisors’ sentiment towards the service had improved. As expected, we noticed a positive change in the scores for the areas we spent time working on.
The %of Advisors who found the 3 prioritised areas as roadblocks decreased, whereas the ease of use score increased.
The Average Net Promoter Score also saw a 0.74 point increase with more users giving scores such as 7,8,9 & 10.
Using this research as foundation, the following year saw several more research-based enhancements made to the service. All these changes led to the assets managed under this service grow from $2 billion USD to $10 billion USD surpassing the year's projection.
