Case Study 01
Partner
Connect
The Problem
A new revenue stream.
Our 401(k) business was growing but we needed a new revenue stream to really hit our goals.
We were too reliant on our partnerships with payroll providers, such as Gusto and Rippling, and knew we needed to expand our lead sources. The question quickly became who is the largest referral in the industry and how could we convince them to join us? After digging into the data we identified financial advisors as the biggest growth opportunity and immediately began crafting a solution to bring them on board — and PartnerConnect was born.
Project Goals
The Team
Who built it.
My Role
I am lead product designer for our PartnerConnect team and I am responsible for crafting the end to end experience for our financial advisors joining our platform. My process has included in-depth industry analysis, numerous user research sessions and continuing refinement of our core product.
I work closely with my product and engineering partners to ensure we are building the right product and in a manner that is scalable for our business.
Design Timeline
A phased approach.
To start the design process we brainstormed ideas to best get into the financial advisor space. Initial ideas included gamifying their referrals, a robust reward program and even a mobile app to easily reach their customers. After a few rounds of user research we decided these would not be enough to drive adoption — we needed a full end to end solution.
The feature set we knew we needed to build was large so we came up with a phased approach to quickly deliver value while maintaining a scalable scope. Our phases, MVP and AMP, are designed to introduce financial advisors to our platform and then incrementally build a complete feature set to keep them engaged.
Design Process
Research first.
User Interviews
My design process began with learning as much as I could about our users and what tools and features they needed. My interviewees included financial advisors from large banks down to owners of small advisor firms. I wanted to reach a wide audience and not focus too much on one segment of the industry.
Prototype Testing
After the initial interviews I crafted a prototype to get the feedback of our potential users. While the general feedback was ok, we knew we could do better. I worked on various solutions focused on long term adoption and feature sets that drove new business to our product.
Research
Findings &
Opportunities
Findings
- Financial advisors have to manage a complex book of clients but often don’t have insight into their various plans across record keepers.
- FAs wanted a single source of truth for their assets under management.
- Tracking plans in the proposal and onboarding phases are viewed very differently.
- There is no solution to identify potential client outreach for participants who may be high earners or recently terminated.
- Advisors need complete control over their investment lineups and must be able to craft custom lineups for each unique retirement plan.
Opportunities
- Combine all of their existing Human Interest plans into our brand new PartnerConnect platform.
- Provide in-depth data and reports to accurately track their assets and growth over time.
- Create a unique page and workflow to manage proposals and onboarding clients who require more hands on service.
- ParticipantIQ was designed to surface high earners, recently terminated employees and those entering retirement age — letting FAs build lasting relationships outside of a 401(k).
- Design a fund swap and custom investment platform to manage custom templates across all plans.
Design Iterations
Finding the visual language.
The early stages of PartnerConnect largely focused on gamification and referral rewards. These early designs helped spread enthusiasm in the company but ultimately fell short for our users’ needs.
Once we nailed down the end solution I worked on visual design to expand our brand into this new space, and I worked closely with engineering to craft unique UI themes that set this space apart while maintaining our brand identity.
The Solution
End to end
for advisors
PartnerConnect and ParticipantIQ took shape as an end-to-end solution for financial advisors to send proposals, onboard new plans, manage investment lineups and reach out to select participants.
PartnerConnect
- Central dashboard to manage all of an advisor’s clients and their entire book of business.
- Comprehensive onboarding tracker to help get new plans launched.
- Investment lineups with custom templates and fund swaps.
- Proposal generation tools to help bring new business.
ParticipantIQ
- A large playground of all participants in the plans they manage.
- Pre-identified segments to identify potential wealth opportunities.
- Custom alerts to never miss a new lead.
- Outreach tools to quickly communicate with participants.
- Weekly email digests to keep engagement high.
Results
Growing every month.
The overall success of PartnerConnect has been tremendous with monthly growth from both financial institutions and individual users.
Monthly active users has increased each month since launch. We are thrilled with the results and will continue to expand our product reach and ideate features to enhance the experience for our users.
Financial advisors now using the platform
Monthly active user growth every month since launch
Products shipped — PartnerConnect and ParticipantIQ
Future Iterations
Now that we have established a large enough daily audience, the team wants to explore adding in my original gamification ideas and referral reward programs. This could help us drive traffic to our 401(k) plans and increase business from both advisors’ accounts under management as well as SaaS fees from new plans.
AI Tooling
With the rapidly expanding AI presence in tech, I am working towards a vision on how we can add AI tools to help our advisors. One idea is to use AI to help identify wealth candidates in the ParticipantIQ portal without the need for users to dig through the data. From there we could use generative AI to craft personalized messages and financial growth charts to send to prospective wealth clients.
Keep exploring