Investor Portal: self-serve for high-net-worth clients

Wealth in high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth families is passing to a new generation. These clients are more tech-savvy than the ones before them, and they want to do things on their own instead of going through an advisor for every request.

Before the portal, most of this happened offline. Some functions were available on the existing website, but it was stuck in a loop: few clients used it, so it was never prioritized, so its data lagged significantly, which kept clients away. Cash withdrawals from collateralized accounts were handled manually.

I started discovery from that insight: what does the next generation of clients need to do on their own, and where is the advisor-led model getting in the way? Routine requests were also taking up advisor time that could go to actual advice.

The goal was to let clients handle routine tasks themselves without weakening the advisor relationship that wealth management depends on.

I ran 20+ sessions with portfolio managers, advisors and investors across business lines and geographies. Three findings shaped the product:

• A handful of requests drove most of the volume: balances, recent activity, statements and withdrawals.

• Clients with multiple accounts, such as family entities and trusts, had no single view and had to ask about each account separately.

• Next-generation clients wanted to act on their own, while established clients still valued their advisor. Advisors worried that self-serve would cut them out, so the portal had to work for both.

I turned these findings into journey maps that set the roadmap and MVP scope with UX, Compliance and Engineering.

• Scope the MVP to routine requests. Four features: multi-account portfolio views, real-time balance checks, self-serve reporting and cash-withdrawal automation. Real-time balances tackled the stale data that had kept clients off the old website. We deliberately left out trading, in-portal messaging and a mobile app. They were bigger builds and didn't address the call volume.

• Automate withdrawals, with guardrails. Collateralized accounts need checks against the credit line before cash can leave. We automated the standard cases and routed exceptions to operations, which gave Compliance confidence to approve the launch.

• Position the portal as support for advisors. Advisors were briefed first and introduced the portal to their own clients, turning a likely source of resistance into the main distribution channel.

I partnered with UX to test navigation and information architecture with users, driving 3 major iterations of the Figma prototypes. The first version mirrored how the bank organizes its products. Testing showed clients think in tasks ("what do I have?", "move money", "get my statement"), so we reorganized navigation around those tasks.

I ran a phased go-to-market with sales, marketing and operations. We launched with one business line first, used the adoption dashboards to fix friction, then expanded to the others.

Before launch, I built adoption dashboards tracking engagement, feature use, task success, error rates and segment penetration. Adoption was defined as the share of eligible clients who used the portal in their first month. Call deflection was the drop in routine call categories against the pre-launch baseline.

• 30% adoption in the first month.

• 720 routine advisor calls deflected a month.

• Withdrawals that used to need manual handling now go through a self-serve flow, with exceptions routed to operations.

• Tag call reasons for a few months before launch. We had to reconstruct the baseline afterwards, and a cleaner one would have made the deflection number easier to defend.

• Bring advisors into the design earlier as co-designers, not just interviewees. Their buy-in drove adoption more than any single feature.