The Family Office
Future vision for an investment platform for ultra high net worth individuals. Read More
Problem Statement
Design a future vision for a wealth management platform geared towards ultra high net worth individuals.
Backstory
Family offices are firms that manage the wealth of ultra high net worth families. In the last few decades, the number and net worth of wealthy individuals and families has grown dramatically. Unfortunately, family offices have been slow at adopting new technologies and business process efficiencies.
This will have a big impact on their business in the future as the wealthy become more tech savvy and prepare to hand over assets to their children. Realizing this, The Family Office approached us to help them create a vision for their future.
Challenges & Obstacles
Gaining an understanding of a complex and niche subject in a short amount of time was challenging.
There were a large number of stakeholders. Getting answers and receiving consolidated feedback required a lot of back and forth.
The client only provided us with a PDF of their brand guidelines and design system. No digital assets such as design mockups or component libraries were shared with us. This meant having to start from scratch.
Approach
The service designers on our team conducted stakeholder interviews and also had conversations with ultra high net worth individuals. They created a vision wheel based on findings from their research.
A vision wheel is a framework that explains a company's vision, design principles and strategies on a single page. We used the vision wheel as a team to come up with a set of user stories that would help us imagine the future of The Family Office. Some examples are:
- Help the user simulate the performance of an investment.
- Train and mentor the next generation of inheritors.
- Webinars by subject matter experts that can be attended live or viewed at one's convenience
- Provide a trusted pool of experts who can be consulted when a new investment opportunity emerges
- Self-serve access to private equity deals
The vision wheel created by the service designers for this project.
This is the design system document shared with us. I used the color, type and grid specifications in this document to create the UI in Figma.
For the first prototype, I designed the mobile app dashboard. The dashboard provides an overview of the user's net worth, portfolio highlights and goals. Additionally, there are quick links to access a smart advisor tool, a community view and advice from relationship managers.
In the portfolio highlights section, users can tap on each tile to see more detail. For example, the investment tile leads to a screen with more information about the performance of the investment portfolio and how money is allocated across asset classes, geographies and providers.
Selecting "Smart Advisor" lets the user simulate changes to their net worth. The user changes their monthly spending by adjusting sliders, which updates the chart to show their current, best and worst net worth projections.
"The Community" section provides insights into the habits and preferences of users who have a similar profile and risk appetite. It includes things like courses or events they might be attending and deals they might be investing in.
The second prototype, also known as "TFO Academy" shows the "Learn" section of the app. The landing screen has tabs for discovering courses, adding videos to a watchlist, setting goals and taking courses.
Each course thumbnail shows the course level, associated tags, the course author, number of videos and the total course duration.
The goals section enables the user to create a learning program for other family members and inheritors.
The user chooses learning goals from a set of keywords and adjusts settings to tailor the course based on the course taker's investment savviness. For example, the user can progressively reveal the investment portfolio as the course taker takes more courses and reaches a certain level.
For the "Secondary Markets" prototype we designed the deals section of the app. This is where users can learn about various investment opportunities and can bid for or buy in.
Deal suggestions in this section are generated using AI and direct advice from TFO relationship managers.
After inspecting the details of a deal, users can make an offer and see anonymous bids that have been made by other investors.
When they make an offer, users are also alerted of the impact of a deal on their whole portfolio, so that they can make better investment decisions.
The fourth prototype is called the "Experts Community". Users can look for wealth management experts here based on criteria such as asset, geography and industry.
Each expert profile has a rating, specialties and reviews. At a glance a user can also see the type of questions they can ask the expert and the deals they've endorsed on the TFO platform.
Once the user has found an expert they want to speak to, they can schedule an appointment with them. The booking screen lets them choose a date, time slot and add a message. They can also specify a deal if their question is deal specific.
Result
The Family Office used the animated prototypes to gather input from a cross-section of stakeholders, which helped them set high level goals for future versions of the platform.
After internal discussions about the feasibility of the features we proposed, they approached us in the coming months to help them oversee the design and implementation of the new features.