TL;DR

1. I led the design execution in overhauling our oldest codebase to provide a modernized, mobile-native account opening experience
2. Drove the vision for enabling account opening within 5 minutes
3. Notable impact:
   1. Reduced account opening errors from 27% to 11%
   2. Reduced account opening time from 10 hours to 5 minutes
   3. Reprioritized launching Cash as an add-on account opening experience over our scheduled M1b launch:
      1. Allowed the Financial Services team to launch the Cash product 3 months earlier than planned
      2. $1 billion deposits in first 3 months
      3. Industry-leading 5% APY

Goals

1. Overhaul our oldest codebase
2. Create mobile-native account opening experience; currently clients can only open accounts on web, and mobile web experience is sub-optimal
3. Overhaul entire on-boarding experience to present a warm welcome to prospective clients in order to build a long-term financial relationship

Research

Project kicked off with a 5-day GV Design Sprint

• Brought in-house experts from our internal Client Services, Brokerage Operations, Product and Engineering teams to gain context and empathy for existing complexity and client frustrations over our clunky account opening process

• Created multiple concepts that fed into an overall experience map:

  

• Realized we had to break the project into multiple parts in order to ship meaningful improvements to clients ASAP; sequenced as:

  • M1 (infra-focused)
    • M1a: consolidate steps to simplify choosing a funding source
      • Expedited if client had previously linked funding sources
    • M1b: mobile-native add-on account opening (taxable and IRA account types)
    • M1c: new account opening (taxable and IRA account types)
    • M1d: long-term strategy for merchandizing optional investment strategies
    • M1e–g: new account opening (other account types, e.g. joint, trust, 529)
  • M2: overhaul risk tolerance presentation
  • M3: overhaul pre-funded account page

Wireframes and Mockups

Wireframes of representative screens

Integrating Intuit TurboTax© into our existing signup flow diagram

Curveballs

Along the way, we encountered a few speed bumps:

• Our Design Sprint prototype got lambasted by leadership for violating a primary principle of not leveraging linking external databases to automate the account opening process (see result below)
• The company was receiving a small (but amplified) amount of negative feedback around the presentation of our PassivePlus suite of investment strategies; result