Account Activity Milestones

Project Overview

Pain Points:

• Lack of transparency into what triggers buying and selling activity on individual accounts.

• Financial Advisers and branch employees were unable to give transparent insight to their clients with confidence.

• The current system was a manual process that spanned multiple tools and required manual input. It was highly inaccurate and resulted in hours of preparation, prior to all meetings.

Context Notes:

This particular pain point had existed over 10 years when it was brought to me. The workflow of account reviews is a universal workflow for all financial advisors and their branch support staff. Previous attempts to come to a solution were always driven from the corporate office and lacked user level research and input.

Initial Assumptions:

The following are the assumptions that were turned over to me, prior to discovery and required validation.

• This pain point, while a problem, did not significantly impact the branch work.

• Branches created their own usable workarounds to navigate the process.

• The information provided to clients was accurate, but incomplete.

• Current tools (while not ideal) provided branches with a reasonable amount of information for the client.

Discovery Research

Process:

To validate the initial assumptions, I conducted the following discovery research:

• 1 on 1 business stakeholder interviews

• Workflow and journey mapping of available tools

• Collecting and sorting through the available training materials for the branch employees, regarding the process.

Key Findings:

I used the above methods to validate the initial assumptions, as follows:

• This pain point, while a problem, did not significantly impact the branch work. The pain point significantly impacted branch work, resulting in a loss of hours in productivity and often, inaccurate information.

• Branches created their own usable workarounds to navigate the process. Validated.

• The information provided to clients was accurate, but incomplete. It was actually impossible for branches to know if the information they were providing to clients was inaccurate or complete.

• Current tools (while not ideal) provided branches with a reasonable small amount of information for the client. However, to piece together the information from each tool required manual cross checking of the information across 3-7 tools.

• The primary complaint was not the lack of information, but the inability to get any information efficiently or with confidence.

• Branches wanted something that distilled the information concisely and in a format that allowed them to map to a time frame.

Problem Statement

With the above validated assumptions, I settled on the below problem statement:

Initial Concepts

I have the habit of working out my initial ideas on paper. Here is a messy look into my brain during this process: