Case Study

Reinventing the Wealth Management experience

D1G1T is taking on the challenge of moving the traditional wealth managment into the future by providing an integrated SaaS platform to manage operations and clients at scale and in real-time.

Back to home

Project Overview

D1G1T is an ambiious FinTech company looking to remake the standard for wealth management with their SaaS platform covering the entire advisory management clycle from client onboarding, client management, portfolio management, trading, reporting, compliance, and business management. D1G1T was looking for a team to take the their early concept design prototypes, extend, and create a formal design system, plus to work with them and their clients to better understand the process employed today of and build interfaces and intuitive digital processes to make a major technology leap forward in the space.

The goal of the project was to provide a complete end-to-end platform for running advisory businesses and to ensure transition strategies for moving clients from the existing systems into the new online platform. This online platform was to provide real-time data in an easy to understand interface and allow unprecedented abilities to analyse and provide recommendations through on online platform with access for the entire advisory team as well as client views and native mobile applciations for clients to track their investments.

My Role

The D1G1T client project, which I ran for approximatly 6 years from 2017 to 2023 focused primarily on design work on both the D1G1T Wealth Management (SaaS) platform and the Investor iOS and Android application. During this time I had the pleasure of working closely with the Chief Product Officer (CPO) and Co-founder of D1G1T as we endevored to re-imagine the complex process required for managing client portfolios in an intuitive web platform.

Over the span of 6+ years I worked directly with their CPO, CTO and product team with regular biweekly touch points. Following agile methodologies I worked to understand and break down the complex processes required by clients, craft new designs, components and online processes for the D1G1T platform, replacing the existing excel and paper based processes done today. I worked on all aspects of the platfom including:

Rebalancing (manual and auto)
Investment Mandate
Investment Strategies
Model Portfolios
Model Portfolio Management
Model Portfolio Rebalancing
Compliance and Supervisory Reviews
Allocation Constraints
Trade Order management
Composite account management
Household Structuring and Management
Account Management
Performance Monitoring
Benchmarking
Report Generation
Custom Report Creation
Client Management
Scenario Analysis
Investor Portal
Investor Mobile Application
Two Factor Authentication

My contributions were both as a primary contributor to the design efforts as well as strategist and project/team leader directing a team of UX/UI designers and researchers through regular two week sprint work.

To learn more about my involvement on this project please reach out to me at kevin.scott.martin@gmail.com

Design System

A custom design system was developed for the D1g1t platform. The system focused on optimizing screen space usage while ensuring to focus user attention correctly for the data-heavy processes required when performing wealth management tasks. Using a design system was critical to ensure we could quickly design, prototyping, and build the platform while maintaining a consistent experience.

The D1G1T design system was built to be highly extendable, based on a core of scalable, modular components. This allowed us to support an object-oriented design (OOD) system at the code level, which together allowed the entire platform to be tuned and grow as new functions and processes were added over time.

As with any extensible and scalable system, it was critical to weigh the potential future needs for extensibility against the cost of building flexibility that may never be needed. To account for this, we iterated over fast/lightweight rounds of “Research > Prototype > Question” cycles, first learning what a process or component would need to design the prototype concept(s), then questioning it against other similar processes and client needs. If the concept did not meet the need or was inconsistent with other elements of the application, we continued to iterate and optimize before moving to standardize the design system changes and releasing for final implementation. Smaller cycles during feature design with larger overarching consistency passes allowed us to hone in on the appropriate level of flexibility and component complexity while creating a consistent, cohesive user experience.

Client Hierarchy Navigation

With the complex nature of client account relationships (households, clients, accounts, foundations) and their association into investment mandates, it became apparent we needed a simple way to allow users to make selection and filtering choices. To do this, I began working on a common control to be the cornerstone of the navigation. This control allowed users simple control over advanced filters (pre-defined and custom), combining accounts, and hierarchy navigation, which would then influence the display of information on screen. When combined in sequence we the control additionally allowed us to bring together seperate households to allow combined reporting or comparisons. The control has become core to the entire D1G1T system, including the platform and mobile applications.

Figure: Floating Page Context Component

Figure: Client Selector Widget

Complex Tasks: Rebalancing

Complex processes and tasks are common in the D1G1T platform. Our aim was to provide a highly responsive and visually optimized display to the user, but often these displays require complex calculations and data pulls on each change or modification. Rebalancing strategies and accounts is one area which required regular asynchronous data pulls throughout the interactions. In the case of these processes, it was critical to our team to work closely with both the business and development teams to create trade-offs between desired behaviour and technical feasibility. Through transitional visual behaviours, we were able to “hide” processing time and find additional cycles to execute calculations without impacting user experience. These transitions, along with an iterative approach to design and execution, allowed us to create a highly performant solution to the complex rebalancing process.

Mobile Application

The investor companion mobile application was designed to provide the investor with the ability to review their portfolio and documents as well as quickly be able to connect with their advisory team. The design focus for this application was to create a consistent feel with the D1G1T platform while leveraging native mobile application components. By connecting both the D1G1T design system to the native controls, we were able to maintain a cohesive experience while providing a low barrier to entry for users new to the application.

Unlike the main platform, the mobile application required the ability to be “White-Labelled” to allow D1G1T’s clients the ability to customize the color space, fonts, and logos to match their brand. As our design system was already built with extensibility in mind, the addition of a brandable layer proved to be a small change rather than requiring a larger design and code refactor.