Creating a future for wealth onboarding that all J.P.Morgan teams got behind and made happen
Client: J.P.Morgan
Year: 2019
Role: Project lead
Main responsibilities: Client relationship, stakeholder engagement and facilitation, strategic direction, team upskilling and coaching, delivering key research and design activities
Livework team: Two user researchers, two service designers, one project manager, one director
Client team: One project manager, an executive director and one change management; for the project last 6 weeks one service designer, one org designer and one UI designer
First things first, what’s onboarding?
Onboarding is the journey during which a prospect becomes an actual customer. They have to provide information. The bank will verify and document everything before they can open an account. With customers who invest millions, banks need to perform thorough due diligence to ensure money is ‘clean’. The risks are high with huge fines and reputational damage for banks found guilty of facilitating money laundering.
We ran this project in an agile way
We regularly prioritised next steps to best support outcomes and held regular engagements to foster healthy collaboration. This was critical not only to shape solutions benefiting all stakeholders but also to create buy-in and momentum.
Discover
“Onboarding has grown over time and no one’s ever stopped to ask why. Where has it come from?”
- Internal interview with a compliance team member
We learnt the intricacies of onboarding through extensive user research.
Onboarding is complex. Many teams are involved, each using specific processes and tools. To understand everyone’s contribution, difficulties, procedures and how they affect clients, we ran 40 interviews and download sessions to cover the sheer number of roles involved.
Imagine
From insights to opportunities, to concepts
We worked with our closest stakeholders to further develop the opportunities we identified, assessed impact and effort to prioritise the most relevant ones.
We established working groups, each with a specific set of expertise. Together we developed early ideas into concepts, identified their enablers and assessed their effort and impact.
Exemple of a refined opportunity
Overview of concepts and the opportunities in which they sit
From concepts to prioritising upcoming efforts
We refined concepts with the working groups members’ ad-hoc support into tangible propositions to be evaluated, refined and prioritised.
Together we decided that Livework would focus on prototyping the first concept and enabling the second.
1. The digital account opening platform
2. The Service Experience council
Example of a refined concept with their impact and effort assessment, as well as dependencies
Prototype and test
We changed the resourcing model for the last 6 weeks of the project for both the prototype and enable phases. Other Liveworkers said goodbye and I stayed to work more closely with the new J.P.Morgan team that would continue delivering the programme initiatives. This worked really well to progressively move the ownership of the project, transfer knowledge and skills and build their confidence.
The digital account opening platform supports clients to easily complete the activities required to open an account with J.P.Morgan:
Provide personal information and documents, communicate their structure-set-up, or delegate these to their team.
Review and consent to key service terms
Choice
We offer options to clients to complete account opening activities with us or on their own, face to face or remotely. We make it easy for them to delegate and offer to coordinate with their people.
Clarity
We make it crystal clear to clients what they have to do. We provide in-situ guidance in the right format to avoid clutter. We provide real-time support from their account team at all times.
Minimised efforts
We only ask for information once and pre-populate everything we know or can access. We only ask for information if it is required, whilst making it straightforward to provide more when the need arises.
Transparency
We summarise terms while allowing clients to know more, so that clients easily understand what they’re agreeing to. We use plain English in our terms.
It improves onboarding for everyone involved.
For Clients
A better experience that meet their expectations, less efforts and less friction
Faster process, less back and forth communication with the bank
For Private Bankers
Decreased chances of loosing a prospect, assets join their portfolio faster
Start relationships on positive foundations and convey J.P.Morgan as an innovative customer-driven bank
For operations
Less manual processing, faster and more efficient workflows; Less opportunities for errors that would lead to back and forth communication
Eased collaboration with front office and decreased stress
For the bank
Profit generated by having assets under management faster; Less drop offs during onboarding means more clients with assets under management
Decreased operational costs
We tied together the digital account opening onboarding platform with other key concepts and capabilities enabling it.
Even though many key concepts were not prioritised yet, the digital account opening platform operationalisation touches on many of them.
For exemple, by articulating required processes, we clarified internal roles and responsibilities required for healthy collaboration and efficient processing.
I reorganised account opening forms into a slick digital information architecture.
The existing accounting opening pack weighted 1.8kg. It included 270 pages across 10 documents to read, as well as between 12 to 18 documents with usability issues to fill and requiring up to 16 signatures.
We focused our efforts on rethinking information input and consent. I led information architecture efforts, supported by onboarding officers. I broke down forms, fields, terms to which consent in palatable and more intuitive sections.
Card sorting sessions to explore different mental models around the different fields and terms of the account opening forms
We brought the new information architecture into a digital prototype that could be tested and iterated.
Note that the prototype was developed by a J.P.Morgan UX designer.
We validated the desirability of a digital onboarding experience through testing.
🎉 Those who interact with clients on a daily basis are extremely positive about how clients would react the digital onboarding platform.
“At my analyst level you would really feel the benefits. This is in the best interests for the client and the bank”
- Private Banking Analyst
☑️ Majority of clients willing to complete activities online. Value in completing activities together with clients to showcase the J.P.M. experience but mostly ensure it is done.
☑️ Moving from a document logic to a flow of activities, new information architecture.
☑️ Understandability, reduced efforts and associated back-and-forth or additional requests
Enable
Designing and setting-up decision making mechanisms for the onboarding team to pursue the work.
A journey owner was appointed.
I spent time with her to transfer knowledge, supported by our deliverables. Together we also refined the service experience council, its governance and supporting materials.
The service Experience council was formed and we established its governance.
It acts as a decision and commissioning mechanism to regularly prioritise efforts to continuously improve onboarding from a client, business and organisation perspective. It’s objectives:
Monitor the end-to-end service health with consistent metrics and make evidence-based decision
Ensure a good enough understanding of problems and solutions before decisions are made
Move beyond incremental and tactical changes, by aligning the pipeline to the strategic vision
We created the materials to support their monitoring of the service and improvements initiatives:
This strategic Kaban supports decision making on initiatives to prioritise and move forward at the different stages of inception and delivery.
It combines short-term with long-term changes to ensure strategic changes also see the light of day.
It clarifies required minimal outputs to submit ideas at each stage. We created a number of templates to help employees articulate their ideas and benefits, but also allow an efficient assessment by the Service Experience council with scorecards.
The blueprint, is owned by the journey owner. It supports the monitoring of the service health and improvement initiatives.
The expanded version further dives into the insights and service performance metrics from a client, business and organisation point of view.
The collapsed version is a helicopter view. It is used in the Service Experience council to look at the end-to-end service health and align on key points to address.
I often use Excel for blueprints. I favour deliverables that clients can use as working tools, easily edit and make their own over beautiful pdf’s that can end up gathering digital dust. But I can also do pretty ones in Figma.
Impact
🎉 This project secured the budget for the delivery of the digital onboarding platform, and the creation of a global operating model.
The J.P.M. team was equipped to continue the work. All project stakeholders were behind their work and committed to making it happen.
We changed the way they change.
Through multiple and regular engagements, we progressively evolved mindset, and implemented new ways of working.
Healthy collaboration across silos
From… Different views on problems with the tendency to blame other teams, difficult collaboration
To… Shared understanding of challenges to tackle and rallying over the end-to-end customer experience
Organising the service around clients
From… Urgently rolling out tech rails from regulatory and technical requirements, ignoring clients' or internal users' needs
To… The desired experience defining the roadmap; operations, processes, technology and data connected to the customer experience
Agency for the people delivering the service
From… Discomfort over the experience delivered, discouragement about lack of progress or regards
To… Excited employees over the future of onboarding; pride in shaping solutions that improve their experience and the clients’
We built a strong relationship with J.P.Morgan. This project paved the way for a Livework 1.5 M programme to build J.P.M. Service Design capabilities and support them in becoming a more customer centric organisation.
“You’ve been phenomenal on this project Marion - the whole team has been a pleasure to work with, but you really have been outstanding.”
- Tom Foster, Executive Director, Service Design, Asset Wealth Management
I learnt a lot from this challenging project.
I became more of a servant leader.
The project and team scale meant I had to focus on leading, less on doing and be of service to my team. I gained patience, perspective and altitude.Vulnerability and joy are team superpowers.
Resourcing crunches and learning curves created discomfort and intellectual drain on the team. Opening up about our struggles allowed us to connect, built trust and lean on each other.
Service design can't shy away from org design and change management.
We cannot implement change without touching on change operating models. I'm now super'passionate about this!