With the new online onboarding portal and improved working processes, bank staff can now collaborate with other departments, monitor and speed up the progress of a Client Profile creation journey by significantly cutting down the waiting time from 3 months to a few weeks. Through the portal, customers have the flexibility to self-serve and experience greater visibility of their account progress without having to rely on their RMs.

With the goal of transforming Bank X’s client lifecycle journey, the team dived straight into the issues on the onboarding journey — from the time they think about Bank X to the time their account is opened. Ethnographic research was conducted in 2 weeks, across 2 countries (Singapore and Hong Kong) with high net worth individuals and Bank X’s staff from relationship managers (RM) to supporting compliance officers. Interviews were conducted in two different languages; English and Mandarin. In order to quickly understand Bank X’s environment and work processes, we leveraged on the staff’s financial knowledge by checking in and shadowed multiple compliance officers on a daily basis.

Led by our design director, we created interview guides to learn and understand the dynamics within the different teams in the bank, between the bank and its customers, as well as their perceptions of and experiences with other banks. Our understanding of the onboarding process slowly took shape as we slowly fill up a journey map after each interview session. During these few weeks, our initial assumptions and questions were challenged, debunked, answered and proven. From identifying a prospect to post account opening, we made sure to document every single step in this E2E journey which led us to rounds of synthesis in the later stage.

1. Clients are not all untouchable emperors
Contrary to what we believe, HNW clients are very experienced with digital services like Netflix and Spotify just like you and I. Many of them cross-references and expect these digital experiences with banks too. They are also comfortable with data sharing within the bank and do not expect to have their data treated with absolute secrecy. While most of us think that the wealthy are all high maintenance and needs to be serviced, to our surprise, many are very willing to collaborate with RMs and self-service whenever needed.
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2.  Overprotecting the RMs only creates more unnecessary steps
The bank introduced a new onboarding document preparation process for the RM. Instead of preparing a list of documents through the assistant RMs, RMs have to leverage on the compliance team to do so. However, this creates an additional step and queue for the very experienced RMs who are already very familiar with the documents. As for younger RMs, it also means that they will overlook the product section, as opposed to what some RMs are interested in exploring more about this topic at this stage.
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3. More red carpet cases from the RMs, more workload for the compliance officers at the end of the chain
Ultra HNW clients or special clients receive “red carpet” treatment as their onboarding journeys are expedited. In Hong Kong and China where there are many such clients, compliance officers need to stop all other cases and dedicate themselves to clear the clients quickly, causing an inevitable delay of the other processes while being overloaded with work.
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There are two different groups of officers within the compliance team. One gathers all the necessary client information to complete the Know-your-customer (KYC) process while the other checks and approves the applicants. In order to clear these red carpet cases quickly with no mistakes and little inquiries from Team B, Team A tends to gather too much information more than needed, causing a massive workload to Team B to look through the details. These side effects usually cause a massive delay to the other normal clients, resulting in disgruntled applicants who decide to leave and switch banks as well as a team of stressful and upset officers who struggle to reach their KPIs.

Instead of coming up with personas, we put together 4 different mindsets for the client and RM each. Mindsets are used as a framework that organises how people think. It changes depending on the context, unlike persona. Some people have a dominant mindset while others have fluid ones that change. In this project, we chose to design for the different extreme mindsets in mind instead of a combination.
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Although we only interviewed a handful RMs, it was very apparent that some of them portray very strong characters of the mindset. For example, one of the RM we interviewed was a Challenger who totally micromanaged us throughout the interview with her client; in order not to hurt the relationship she has painstakingly built over time, she restricted us to certain questions in the interview guide and instructed us to constantly compliment the client for taking his time out to meet us.
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In another interview, I spoke to a young, wealthy UHW chinese who is very knowledgeable about the finance and IT industry. He told us that he enjoys meeting his young RM as they would constantly share new investment ideas from time to time. While he expects his RM to be proactively servicing him, he is also very cooperative and hands-on. He clearly showed characteristics as a partner. As a tech-savvy client, he also has liquid expectations for the bank and needs the bank to constantly innovate and exceed their competitors’ standards.

Once we are ⅓ into the project, we prepared and facilitated a full-day workshop for the client. The workshop allows us to share our findings such as research themes and allow for more co-creation on ideas. Some activities included round robin where participants worked on different themes and built on the initial idea within their group. To maximise effective interaction, we always group staff of different levels and department together. The more awkward, the better. Chances are, teams tend to benefit from such groupings when experiences from different levels are shared. It is very fulfilling to witness different departments coming together to discuss and challenge one another’s idea as they bring in different perspectives; a rare occurrence in many companies.
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A total of 6 concepts, closely guided by our design principles, were co-created from the workshop. What we did next was to distill and prioritise them into 20 individual features. Through in-depth discussion and validation with stakeholders, through the use of wireframes, we thought about how it could live together in different parts of an online portal.

In this project, the visual designer and I designed the UI to visualise the steps taken in separate journeys of an RM and user. Basic research was done together as we compiled different visual and interaction references.
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Due to the tight deadline and public holidays, work was split up between the visual design and I. With a basic visual direction from the VD, I was tasked to create all the screens while the he worked on making the journey map interactive.

Several user validation sessions were conducted in English and Chinese in line with the creation of the screens over the next few weeks. To ease the users into a 1.5 hour long session, we incorporated card sorting activity on possible UI features and bank services. This helped the users to lead the conversation naturally. The activity is also especially valuable as we validated some features that were highly favourable from the client’s point of view.  

Within a short period of 1 month, we managed to create the designs from paper sketches to medium fidelity screens. We also iterated the designs swiftly from our daily check-ins with stakeholders up till the last 2 days of the project.

Our final concepts were grouped into 1) experience led and 2) technology and organisation led.
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1) Experience led
For customers: Users can self-serve when it comes to transparency on the process (setting expectations) and account opening status instead of relying on their RMs
For RM: Easy collaboration between teams on the portal instead of having to go through physical means or other digital channels
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2) Technology and organisation led
For customers: KYC formalities validation for unauthenticated data sources can be directed to the client’s secretary automatically
For RM: Automated and continuous early screening and risk scoring on profile data once prospect is entered into the system; empowered in early stages of meeting through OCR/ICR

The end deliverables, delivered in a short time, were of high quality and it was only possible because the team members were very complementary and collaborative.

In this project conducted in Singapore and Hong Kong, I interviewed over two dozen high networth clients and relationship managers in English and Mandarin to find out their interactions and expectations of the bank. I played a key role in planning and drafting the interview guides and activities, designing the screens and conducting validation sessions with our stakeholders throughout the whole project. Moreover, the lack of a PM on the project has given me a chance to stand up and manage the pace; especially when we had to print several physical deliverables for the workshop and to sort them out in a short time.

If I had the opportunity to redo this project, I would think of better ways to recruit the HNW individuals within a short period of time. In addition, I would go through our interview guidelines with the clients to prevent too much intervention during the interview session itself.
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That said, I am thankful for having a very supportive group of clients who were always there for us to make any clarifications. Our daily check-ins enabled us to meet our objectives in a short period of time. The project was also very well planned with ample time for the research phase, so we could carry it out thoroughly.